§ log.012 — i designed a crewneck for a product nobody uses

I added an Adversec crewneck mockup to my portfolio this week.

Adversec has maybe five users. I shipped it months ago — API-first adversarial testing, Supabase auth, live on adversec.io. It works. It's real. And basically nobody uses it.

So I designed a crewneck for it and put it in my portfolio. A product with single-digit users now has merch that'll probably never get printed.

That sounds stupid when I write it out. But it's also the most honest thing on my portfolio.

the thing nobody talks about

Most people who build stuff on the internet have an audience of dozens. Not thousands. Not millions. Dozens. A handful of friends, some mutuals on Twitter, maybe a Discord server where 12 people are active.

But you still make things. Not because you're delusional about the numbers — because making things is the part you actually enjoy. The shipping. The designing. The part where something that didn't exist twenty minutes ago now lives at a URL and looks kind of good.

The crewneck is a "what if." What if Adversec got traction. What if I ran a small merch drop. What if the thing I built in a weekend turned into something people actually wanted to wear.

It probably won't. I know that. But I made the mockup anyway because not making it felt worse than making it and being wrong.

my portfolio is a graveyard of side bets

The Adversec crewneck joins a growing collection of things I've built that might never pay off:

• WrapsRL — $215/mo, capped by something I can't control
• EmotePack.ai — shipped in 24 hours, landing page didn't hit
• Adversec — live, functional, no distribution
• BTRFLY Tournaments — ran esports events, learned a lot, shut it down

Every single one of these was a bet. Most of them won't land. But each one taught me something I used in the next one, and each one exists — a real thing I built, not a hypothetical I talked about.

The portfolio isn't a highlight reel. It's a log of attempts. Some shipped. Some didn't. The crewneck is the most honest artifact in that collection because it admits upfront: this might never be real, and I made it anyway.

you don't need an audience to build

There's this pressure to only ship things that "scale." If it can't hit 1,000 users, don't bother. If the TAM isn't big enough, move on.

I think that's the wrong framing for where I'm at. I'm 23. I work at Starbucks. I'm going back to school. The thing I actually need right now isn't scale — it's reps. Building things, shipping them, learning what sticks and what doesn't. Treating every project like a data point instead of a life-or-death launch.

The Adversec crewneck is a rep. It might never be a real drop. But it's on the portfolio because making it felt right, and being honest about that feels even better.

$ echo "the crewneck probably won't get printed. made it anyway."
the crewneck probably won't get printed. made it anyway.