AI Notebook is a project of our own that Janie and I are building with a small team.

Right now, it’s still far from a finished product.

We don’t have a device ready to sell. We don’t know exactly who will buy it, what price could work, or whether this project will ever make its first sale.

But we’ve decided to start sharing the story now.

From day one, while we were still working through the earliest questions, we started documenting the process. Not so we could turn it into a polished case study later, but so we could capture the moments when we genuinely didn’t know whether we were heading in the right direction.

This series will follow us as we build a real brand from scratch. We’ll share the early assumptions, market research, customer decisions, product direction, Shopify store, traffic experiments, and our attempt to reach the first sale.

Some assumptions will be challenged by evidence. Some ideas won’t get the response we hoped for. Some decisions will have to be revisited.

This isn’t a course or a step-by-step formula for building a brand.

Think of it more like a builder’s field notes. Every post starts with something that actually happened: an unanswered question, an assumption we need to test, an unexpected result, or a decision that changes where the project is heading.

You might never be an AI Notebook customer. But if you’re building a Shopify store or a brand of your own, you’ll probably run into some of the same questions:

  • Is this problem actually worth solving?
  • Is the customer group we know best really the right one to sell to?
  • What does a click, an email signup, or a positive comment actually tell us?

We won’t be able to share everything. Customer data, supplier terms, margins, and numbers that could directly affect the brand will stay private.

But within those limits, we want to keep this story honest enough for you to see what building a brand really looks like while the decisions are still being made and the outcome is still unknown.

A real brand. A real store. Real experiments.

In the next post, we’ll go back to day one, when our first question wasn’t:

“How do we build this notebook?”

It was:

“Should we build it at all?”