November in Review

November in review

Where I was

Much like October, November was a lot of moving around.

We started the month based in Osaka, exploring the city and doing trips out to Kyoto and Nara. First time in Japan and it was awesome. Coming directly from South Korea made it even more interesting to feel the differences between two countries that share a lot of history.

After Osaka we went to Tokyo for a packed few days before heading to Singapore, where we stayed about a week for a family reunion. Singapore was brutal on the runway and on progress. It was basically solid family time, which was good, but it meant almost no work got done.

From Singapore we flew to Hanoi for a few days and then Ha Long Bay for a week. I got back down to business there and shipped a ton in Hanoi and Ha Long while also exploring around the city.

This return to Vietnam is special for me. I grew up here for about 3–4 years as a kid farther in the north. I also spent time here two years ago during one of the Clipper Race stopovers. The chaos of Hanoi is unique. It is an intense, interesting city with a very specific history and culture.

Main focus: DiveJourney, community v1, PhaseDrift

The month was mostly about pushing DiveJourney forward and getting PhaseDrift to a usable state. For DiveJourney, most of the work falls into three buckets: organic discovery, shop growth features, and the community layer.

Organic discovery

The first half of November I launched deeper destination content. The goal is to have highly useful, highly ranked destination guides for scuba, freediving, and snorkeling that pull in organic traffic.

In November I expanded from 12 destination guides to 42. These are not perfect yet, but they are live, useful, and give me a lot more surface area for discovery and experimentation.

Shop growth

I shipped a map embed for shops to add to their websites. This directly adds value to dive shops, resorts, and centers, and should also pull in more traffic from those sites back to DiveJourney.

I have a couple of shops as early partners on this, using the embed and giving feedback. This is a big step toward a real product for shops, not just divers.

Community layer

The core of DiveJourney's long-term growth is the community layer, which basically did not exist before. You could tag buddies and have friends, but that was about it.

Step one here was adding a User Map Visibility v1. On the main dive map there is now a "Community Map" view that shows user locations (anonymous and not exact) for any users that have set locations on their profiles.

It is pretty wild and exciting to see where users are scattered around the world. This sets the stage for trip planning, overlaps, and buddy finding in the future. A big push for December will be getting more people to actually set their locations, since right now only a small percentage of active users have done that.

PhaseDrift

Another big win is that PhaseDrift is actually up and working, with DiveJourney dogfooding it.

The whole reason I started PhaseDrift was to give DiveJourney an edge in AI assistant visibility. Now I can finally start monitoring and adjusting things and see what actually moves the needle for ranking in top prompts and assistant answers.

This is also why I wanted solid destination guides shipped. I can now track AI answer visibility against them and eventually run different experiments and maybe even get to action or conversion tracking as this space matures.

Big wins

• Shop map embeds live
• Homepage filter tag discovery improvements
• 30 new destinations (12 → 42)
• User community map v1
• PhaseDrift end to end, with DiveJourney as the first tenant
• Travel across Japan, Singapore, and Vietnam while still shipping

Friction and failures

• Going from a high-paying job to stressing about buying a cocktail in Singapore was an interesting contrast
• Deep work was hard with so much travel and short stays
• A full week with family in Singapore was great, but basically a write-off for shipping
• I am learning that my sweet spot for travel is a minimum of 2 weeks in a location, ideally 1 month, to balance exploration with work

What I learned

• I have been so focused on building product that I have not been documenting or sharing the journey nearly enough
• My current lifestyle is unusual enough that it is worth writing about: the travel, the building, the experiments
• That is why I am now committing to monthly reviews, weekly Shiplogs (already happening inside DiveJourney), founder Shiplogs, and weekly Field Notes to share more of the real process
• People and cultures are incredibly different. Feeling the subtle shifts from place to place, even over short timescales, is one of my favorite parts of travel
• I genuinely love meeting and talking with people wherever I go

December focus

• Community layer for DiveJourney (overlaps, buddies, trip planning foundations)
• Shop partnerships and early customers for DiveJourney
• PhaseDrift experiments using DiveJourney as the test bed
• Locking into routine back in Bangkok for a longer 4 month block:
  • Consistent shipping
  • Fitness and health
  • Language learning

Breakthroughs

• It finally clicked that if I am going to make this work, I need much bigger reach
• I am not yet sure if that reach will come more from builder channels (me sharing the process) or directly from the product, but I know I need to put myself and the work out there
• I already do a lot in my "normal" life. Turning that into stories and systems of accountability for shipping, writing, and sharing feels both natural and necessary

What did not go as planned

• I would have liked to ship more features, do more outreach, and land more partnerships and users
• The combination of rapid travel and constant moves (3–7 day stays) made it very hard to stay in deep work mode
• A week with family was great personally, but I underestimated how much it would break momentum

What I am optimizing for in December

• DiveJourney shop partnership growth
• PhaseDrift learnings, experiments, and real proof that it can move the needle
• Creative content output as a system:
  • DiveJourney Shiplogs
  • Founder Shiplogs
  • Monthly recap
  • Monthly stories on the site
  • Founder Field Notes
  • Regular social posting
• Fitness goals and consistent movement
• Language learning, especially Thai, as I look at Thailand as a more long-term base. That means investing in people, culture, and language. I love languages, so I am excited to go deep on a new script and a new language family.

Closing note

I am writing this from Ba Be National Park in northern Vietnam, where I spent 4 years as a child. It has been a kind of homecoming after 25 years away. I will have more to write about this later, but it has been a special experience to come back and see where I spent such an important part of my childhood.

November also closes out the relatively rapid travel we have been on since the end of July. In December, once we are back in Bangkok, the plan is to lock in and push hard on focus, output, and systems, and go all in on making this solo stretch work with the remaining 7 months of runway.

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