I’m, Technically, An Idiot.

Being a non-technical founder with a ✨vision✨ is painfully cliché but armed with a dream, a liberal arts degree, and nothing left to lose, I fully committed to the adventure.

As many of y’all know, I came up with the concept of Goblins before vibe-coding was a thing, so stubbornly– and fueled by that Panera jet-fuel– I tried building Goblins using no-code platforms (also bullshit, those are low-code, at best). I was able to create an MVP on FlutterFlow which worked flawlessly when someone used the correct browser and the moon was in certain phases.

Fortunately right around the time I realized my DIY MVP wasn’t going to cut it, I cold-messaged a few engineers I found on Twitter (“engineer” + “gamer” with female-presenting bios). Against the odds (and her normally-insane spam filter), one graciously replied and loved the idea enough to build our alpha in her free-time over the next six months.

It was exciting to finally unveil a functioning platform to our Kickstarter backers and OGs (original Goblins, obv). They could sign up! Create profiles! Send each other invites! And they did, and it was glorious.

With a functional (albeit a little awkward-looking) platform, we started getting the word out and new Goblins began signing up. So many in fact, that our systems would break. A lot. The earliest example of this being: while I initially hand-approved profiles to catch 🍆 photos, I quickly realized it was actually more for quality-control (About Me: “I’m a gamer, idk what else to say here”) or the platform was going to be inundated with low-effort profiles. And if there was anything the world didn’t need, it was another shitty social platform. So we sorted the pending profiles queue by newest to oldest so that I could email folks 1:1 feedback about how they could make their profile more compelling and be approved for the platform.

This made sense when we had a handful of sign-ups a day, I’d do them while watching 90 Day Fiancé before I went to bed. Then an influencer organically posted about us and suddenly we had hundreds of new Goblins in a few hours, completely burying my ability to get through the queue. And we had to wait until our developer had time to iterate on optimizing the platform to deal with the latest influx. Our platform development was reactive (grow > break > fix > repeat) and it wasn’t a good experience for the Goblins or myself and the team.

After a few too many of these cycles, I finally took a beat to concentrate on getting our ducks in a row on the technical side—first, starting with talent. Who did I want sitting at the helm of Product? They needed to be more technically savvy than myself, capable of translating my vision of Goblins into a roadmap that wouldn’t collapse every time TikTok decided to be nice to us.

So, that’s what I’ve been heads-down on for the last few months (well, that and the 500 Global accelerator). Finding a dream team that’s willing to work for equity isn’t an easy task, but I’ve been slowly assembling our rare Pokémon and gosh, we’ve been lucky. I couldn’t ask for a better collection of humans to be in these trenches with.

Handing the reins over has also forced me to confront some early-stage founder habits I needed to retire– — like being the human bandaid, or trying to brute-force my way through every bottleneck. Letting go of that and shifting into “build something survivable, not just scrappy” has been its own growth arc.

I’m excited to let this absolute power-squad run forward on finally getting Goblins to where it needs to be. Their first order of business: building for stability before delight, standardizing components so we’re not duct-taping features together, and making sure we never again sort a queue in a way that accidentally punishes our most enthusiastic Goblins (shit, I’m sorry y’all!).

Because we’re committed to transparency on this Goblins’ journey, this is going to be the first of many “build-in-public-but-without-the-bullshit” posts from me and our product squad. We’re going to actually talk through the choices we’ve made- the good, the chaotic, and the messy. If the Goblins community is going to grow with us, y’all deserve to see what’s happening behind the curtain.

So, stay tuned for posts about architecture choices, product tradeoffs, and yes, some fun marketing/PR campaigns that will allow me to dip my toe into vibe-coding without touching the integrity of our platform. Oh, and also a story about how I once accidentally hired an engineer to build us a cruise ship. 

In the meantime, here’s a chart I pulled together of (some of) my crying while building Goblins: