meinpublic Build Log: The First Week, From Brief to Live Site

The meinpublic build log is Tiến’s dated record of building meinpublic in public, and this is its first entry. meinpublic exists so that a person can keep one public map of what they have made, what they are making and who they are becoming, and the people who matter can know the whole of them in one look. As of Oct 18, 2026, the website is live, the app is planned but not built, and there are no members yet.

The record runs 5 days, from the product brief on Oct 13 to today, with the site live 2 days after the brief. What changed and what was parked are told as plainly as what shipped. This log is for anyone deciding whether to keep a map here, and for anyone watching a product being built in the open. The standing reason is on About meinpublic; this is the dated episode. The map on this page is Tiến’s own, kept the way every member will keep theirs.

Why Tiến started it

Tiến runs three products: meinpublic, maptoact and cendora. Beside them he keeps a health goal (reach 60 kg), two goals for his family, and the idea of a tech, farm and education channel. None of it lived in one place, so he had no single story to send to his audience. As a reader he had the other half of the problem: he couldn’t get to know the people whose work he watched. On Oct 16 he put it this way:

There is no way I can learn about them with just posts, images, or the experience, education. Not to mention they might have 1000 posts.

Tiến, founder of meinpublic, Oct 16, 2026

One map per person answers both sides. meinpublic was founded on Oct 10, 2026, in Hue City, Vietnam, and the record starts three days later.

The record, day by day

All times are Vietnam time (UTC+7).

• Oct 13: the brief. One document saying what meinpublic is: a paid community of public maps, reading free, $5 a month to keep a map, Vietnam first, English and Vietnamese from the start.
• Oct 14: the design. Every screen as a clickable mockup, and 16 product calls that changed the brief.
• Oct 15: the site. The website built on Astro, served as Cloudflare Workers static assets. The first commit landed at 18:26 and meinpublic.com was attached at 21:38, 3 hours and 12 minutes later. That is the day counted as live.
• Oct 16: the pages. The blog and its first post, Parked Is Not Failed, at 02:18, then Home, About and the glossary by 03:47. The repository took 59 commits in that one day.
• Oct 16: the app planned. The stack, the order of work and a spec for each component.
• Oct 16: the positioning change. A new headline and a new lead idea, told below.
• Oct 16, evening: Vietnamese. Vietnamese editions of Home, About, the glossary and the essay, held noindex until Tiến reviews them.
• Oct 17: Home rebuilt on the new headline.
• Oct 18: About rewritten as Tiến’s own story, with his map on About and on build-log posts.

What the design changed in the brief

The v0.1 design on Oct 14 overruled the brief in 16 places. The ones a future member will feel:

• Build your map before you sign up. People pay to keep something they just made, not for a blank promise.
• The Monday letter ships at launch. Maps going quiet is the biggest risk, and the letter is the answer to it.
• “Watch”, not “follow”. “Follow” brings feed and follower-count expectations the product refuses.
• One typeface, Be Vietnam Pro. It is an open-source family made for Vietnamese. The brief’s Instrument Serif can’t set Vietnamese diacritics, and a product that starts in Vietnam can’t ship a font that breaks its own language.
• 300 founding places, with no card. Founders get their first year free and are asked for payment in month 11, with a month’s notice.

The headline that changed

On Oct 16 the headline written two days earlier was replaced. The old one said what the product asks of you, not what you get. And being public is what nobody else offers; private progress tracking is everywhere.

	Before Oct 16	From Oct 16
Headline	Say what you’re building. Then keep saying it.	Let people know the whole you, in one look.
Lead idea	The record is the reward	Your work gets found, all of it, and the people who matter get to know you
What it names	What the product asks of you	What you get, as a builder and as a reader
“The record is the reward”	The thesis	The long-term payoff

The old line wasn’t wrong, so it wasn’t let go. The idea behind it moved from the front of Home to the payoff.

The app plan

The app was planned on Oct 16, and none of it is built yet:

• Expo for iOS, Android and the web app at app.meinpublic.com, so one person can ship all three from one project.
• Hono on Cloudflare Workers for the API, and Neon Postgres for the data.
• Public maps at meinpublic.com/handle, on the same domain as this blog.
• Launch without payments. Founders need no card, so the slowest approvals come off the launch path.
• No review queue. Updates publish at once; members can report and block, and Tiến hides what is reported.
• Browse and watch suggestions moved to later. “People like you” means nothing until there are enough maps to compare.

What was parked

Each of these is parked with its reason, not dropped:

• A founding list stored by the website. The app will do the real sign-up, so Home’s email form records nothing yet.
• Stories, the podcast, topic hubs and “shipped this month”. They are designed, but they need real members who agree to appear.
• A page for people building themselves. Home already puts personal goals next to work; a page of its own would split the message.

Where it stands on Oct 18

• Live: the website, with Home, About, the glossary and two blog posts in English.
• Waiting on review: the Vietnamese pages, noindex until Tiến reads them. The Vietnamese Home also waits on a Vietnamese line for the new headline, written for Vietnamese readers rather than translated.
• Not started: the app and the API.
• Members: none yet.

What comes next

The next milestone is the app: the map builder that lets you start before you sign up, and the Monday letter beside it. After that come the first members and the 300 founding places. No date is promised. The next entry in this log comes when one of those ships, because the log keeps one rule: one post per milestone, written when there is something real to tell.