How I Found My SOUL.md and Stopped Cosplaying as an Enterprise
I shipped a product four days after going independent. AI, domain knowledge, 25 years of shipping intuition — the build was the easy part.
Then I tried to talk about it.
Every conversation felt a little like a press release from a company I’d never worked at.
The problem wasn’t the product. The product is good. The problem was the voice — measured, scalable, authorless. The institutional “we” of a hundred-person org with a comms team and three approved adjectives. I was one person, and I was cosplaying as an enterprise.
Here’s what that actually looks like on the page: you soften everything. Companies can’t have opinions, so you hedge yours. No one made the decision, so you go passive. You bury the weird stuff — the fantasy series, the wearables, the dry humor — because surely the enterprise buyer won’t get it.
Even the enterprise buyers I actually want aren’t coming for the press release. They’re coming because something sounded real.
I went back to the work that felt alive.
The first years of Microsoft Docs — self-directing teams, people who genuinely cared, more real collaboration than I’d seen at that scale before or since. Building Channel 9 at Microsoft — video-first, personality-forward, before YouTube used the same recipe. The Silverlight and Windows Phone community at MIX, where the room was full of people who wrote code and had taste and didn’t separate those two things. Flash dev, when designers shipped and engineers had aesthetic opinions and the line between making and building was usefully blurry.
In every one of those, I was playing multiple roles. Being myself. The Creative Technologist — which is a real thing, not a made-up LinkedIn noun.
I had spent several years hiding that.
So I wrote a file. I called it SOUL.md.
The concept is simple: if something I write — or something an AI writes for me — doesn’t pass this document, it doesn’t ship. One-line identity. The through-line. Voice rules. Decisions the file makes for me in the moments I’m tempted to perform.
It’s also a permission slip to chase what I’m actually interested in — not what looks strategic, not what fills a gap in the market. What genuinely holds my attention. Because that’s where the energy is, and the energy is what makes the thing worth reading.
The most load-bearing line in it: if a project feels embarrassing to put next to the others, the problem is the framing, not the project.
The fantasy series is a body of work. The wearables are a line. The photography is a practice. The moment I soften any of those — side project, for fun, just a little thing I’m doing — I’ve already lost the thread.
This turned out to be bigger than the product.
I had been running shards of myself across the internet — not just different tones per platform, but multiple accounts on the same platforms. One for the builder, one for the creative work, one for the art. Like I was so convinced each interest needed its own container that I just kept splitting.
Shards of a whole person, spread thin enough that none of them were actually me.
That’s exhausting. And it doesn’t work. People can feel when nobody’s home.
SOUL.md killed that too. Same person everywhere. One voice. The platform decides the emphasis — not the identity.
Building in public was the other half of the unlock. I won’t pretend I found it alone — friends and strangers pointed at the gap between what I was actually building and what I was sounding like.
Building in public isn’t performing transparency. It’s just being honest about where you are: I built this, I’m figuring out how to talk about it, here’s what it does. That sentence is much easier to write. And people actually read it.
If you’re a solo founder sounding like a company you don’t work at — that’s the sign. The fix isn’t better messaging.
It’s being honest about who’s in the room.
One person. Twenty-five years of work. An AI that moves fast when the direction is clear.
And a file that tells me when I’m losing the plot.
