· building · 2 min
Talk is cheap. Here's my September.
What I worked on in September, sorted by bucket, with receipts. Plenty of building, not much writing
Games, just for fun
- The Climb. Started life as a roguelite, which was way too ambitious. It's now a lane runner, as a fun experiment. Play it.
- Agent Village. Built over a weekend inspried by many other sims. Ten AI residents, each one a sub-agent running on the DeepSeek API, with its own personality, memories and goals. They formed groups and made up their own games and customs.
- Big Trucker. A 3D truck-delivery game in the browser. Released on 30 September. Play it.
Speed to Lead
- My current product bet: helping small businesses win more work from the enquiries they already get.
- Researched it before any code: eight sectors, 18 alternatives and 37 audited claims.
- Built the landing page as a smoke test to gauge appetite, before writing code.
- Still deciding how it ships, and in what form factor.
- Will throw a couple hundred $ behind a PPC campaign to see if I can generate sign ups.
The Capture Loop (client work)
- The Capture Loop is one of my service products. It's for high-ticket specialist businesses that get enquiries online but close on the phone or face to face. We take full responsibility from the ad campaign to the hand-raise sitting in the CRM, and optimise the whole loop. September was spent deep in one client's account.
- This month we have reduced junk enquiries a further 5%
- Reduced cost of a qualified enquiry from $33 to $23
- Increased conversion by a further 22%
Empty Leg Finder V3
- V3 is so close, so much backend work has been done this month building parsers, structuring data, de-duping data etc.
- Front end polish coming up next.
- The target was end of September; we didn't quite make it. Still building.
- Habit worth stealing: a decision log the AI agents can't rewrite.
Site and X
- Rebuilt tariqdeir.com on Eleventy and Netlify, and moved it off Ghost.
- X is where I'm focusing. Started 100 days of posting and replying every day on 24 September. Say hello: @TariqDeir.
Learning and tools
- Went back to basics on the terminal.
- Dictated 95,400 words in VoiceInk.
- Cut eight apps and subscriptions in one morning.
Off the clock
- Teaching my kid to read, eating too many chicken parmi sandwiches, in the WoW Forever beta, and fixing my sleep.
- Finished Paul Arden's It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be. Five stars.
The receipts.
| Number | What |
|---|---|
| 95,400 | words dictated |
| 3 | releases of The Climb in one day |
| 216 | tests and browser checks passing |
| 10 | AI villagers |
| 37 | claims audited before any app code |
| 34 | offers researched |
| 8 | apps cut in one morning |
| 1 | site rebuilt by hand |
| 1 | pink fluffy cat in a cat car my daughter loves |
October.
- Ship Empty Leg Finder V3.
- Decide how Speed to Lead ships: plug-in or standalone app.
- Keep playing with The Climb and Big Trucker.
- Reach day 30 of 100 on X, in late October.
I'll do one of these every month. If you're building something alongside everything else, reply on X and tell me what it is. I'd genuinely love to know.
Catch you in the next one.
Tariq