A Place Where Thoughts Can Land

Why I Built ThinkInPublic

My brain doesn’t move in straight lines. It ricochets.

I’ll open a tab to look up one thing, and ten minutes later I’m in a completely different mental neighborhood—war, games, music, movies, plot lines, character sketches, why certain characters feel like old friends, why others irritate me, why some scenes stick to my ribs for years. One observation triggers another. One question turns into three. Something I see in real life maps onto something I once watched on a screen, and suddenly I’m holding a tiny, clean insight that feels weirdly important.

This is how most of my days go: a constant stream of thinking that’s sparked by whatever I’m encountering—online and offline. The annoying part is not the thinking. The annoying part is what happens right after the best thoughts show up.

They vanish.

The Epiphany Problem

Every so often, I hit a really beautiful conclusion. Not the kind that’s going to win an award, but the kind that makes you pause because it feels true. The kind that connects two things you never connected before. The kind that makes your own lived experience make a little more sense.

And then comes the annoying reality: if I don’t capture it immediately, it’s gone.

The only real way to save an insight is to write it down. But writing it down—consistently—is surprisingly tedious.

• If I want to do it properly, I need pen and paper.
• If I don’t have pen and paper, I’ll reach for my phone.
• If I use my phone, I’ll write it in a messy, half-formed way because typing interrupts the thought.
• If I write it messily, I probably won’t return to it.
• If I don’t return to it, the thought effectively disappears forever.

It’s frustrating because it’s not just that I lose it. It’s that nobody will ever know it existed.

Nobody will know I reached that conclusion just by paying attention to the world around me.

That sounds dramatic, but it’s true in the most ordinary way. Most good thoughts don’t die because they’re wrong. They die because they were inconvenient to record.

I Didn’t Want My Mind to Be a Temporary Place

Think about how many ideas you’ve had that felt real—then evaporated. Not because they weren’t valuable, but because you were in line somewhere, or walking, or half-distracted, or busy, or you just didn’t want to deal with the friction of capturing them.

That friction adds up. Over time, it teaches you a silent lesson: don’t bother.

And once you learn “don’t bother,” you stop reaching for the thought in the first place. You let it pass. You accept that your internal world is private and temporary.

I didn’t want that to be true for me. I didn’t want my mind to be a place where things happen and then disappear, like writing on water.

I wanted a place where thinking could land.

The Other Reason: I Was Already Building Blogging Tools

There’s another practical thread in this story. I had a bunch of other products, and they needed blogging sections. Not for the love of writing—at least not initially—but because blogging helps things rank. It brings traffic. It’s how you build a surface area on the internet that people can actually discover.

So I built a feature where you could manually add blog posts. And by “add,” I don’t mean dumping a wall of text into a box. I mean:

• writing simply
• formatting without fighting the editor
• publishing without turning it into a project

While building that, I started seeing something more interesting than “blog posts for SEO.”

If writing was easy, people would do it more.

And if tagging was easy—and not just easy, but structured—then tags could become more than decorative labels.

Tags Shouldn’t Be Decorative

Most places treat tags like afterthoughts. A loose pile of keywords that nobody takes seriously. You tag things inconsistently, spell them differently, use synonyms, forget them, abandon them. Tags become a junk drawer.

But I kept thinking: what if tags were strict and enforced and structured?

Not strict in a bureaucratic way—strict in a “this actually works” way.

Because once tags have structure, they stop being metadata and start becoming navigation. They become connective tissue.

A thought about war can bump into a thought about a movie. A note about a game can unexpectedly connect to something about music. A character sketch can lead into an observation about your own life. You can move through someone’s mind by following the trails, not just reading isolated posts.

Structured tags can:

• link one thought to another automatically
• create a map of themes over time
• make old writing discoverable again
• spark curiosity (“wait, why is this tagged with that?”)

That’s when the idea snapped into place: this wasn’t just a “blogging section.” This could be a thinking system.

One Thing Built on Top of Another

Once I started building it, it became the usual story: one thing leads to the next.

You add the ability to write. Then you realize the writing needs to be easy or nobody will do it. Then you realize organization matters, but organization has to be lightweight or it becomes a chore. Then you realize that discovery matters, because writing into the void kills motivation. Then you realize that connecting ideas is half the point of thinking in the first place.

So I kept building.

Not because I had a perfect master plan, but because I kept running into the same question: how do you make it natural to capture what you actually think? Not polished, not sanitized, not optimized for engagement—just real.

The Real Motivation: Lost Thoughts Are Tragic

The core reason ThinkInPublic exists is simple: I want people to express what they really think.

Not in the “hot take” way. Not in the performative way. In the honest way that usually never makes it out of someone’s head.

A lot of information is buried and lost forever before it even hits another mind. That’s not just sad in a sentimental way; it’s a genuine waste. Because the world improves when good ideas move between people—when they survive contact with other perspectives.

Most people are walking around with insights they don’t respect enough to write down. Or they respect them, but the tools make it annoying. Or they worry they have to make it “good” before they make it public, so they never do.

And then those thoughts die alone.

I don’t want that.

I want a place where a thought can be small and unfinished and still worth saving. Where the barrier to entry is low enough that you’ll actually use it in the moment you have the thought, not two hours later when the feeling has faded.

“Public” Isn’t Just About Audience

ThinkInPublic isn’t only about broadcasting. It’s about survival.

A private idea is fragile. It depends on your memory and your mood and whether you remember to scroll back through your notes. But when an idea is written down—clearly enough, honestly enough—it becomes harder to erase. It becomes something you can return to. Something someone else can stumble into.

And that matters, because ideas don’t really become ideas until they collide with other minds.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

As long as an idea lives in two minds, it can live forever.

Conclusion

ThinkInPublic came from a very personal frustration: my best thoughts were slipping through my fingers. Building blogging tools for other products showed me the shape of a solution—simple writing, structured tags, and connections that make ideas easier to rediscover. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s capture. It’s giving thoughts a place to land so they can survive long enough to matter.