I started my journey to build Caravan Notes because I wanted to write a book on how anyone can build a business from scratch that unlocks generational wealth. And I was going to prove it with my own business.

I launched v1 of Caravan Notes on July 29th 2025 after 250 days of coding, design, and a lot of thinking. v1 fell short of convincing the market to switch, and I used that, along with the excuse of being away from my office, to take August off to “recalibrate.” It was a mistake. Momentum feels easy when you’re in it. But when you lose it, you’ll find that it’s hard to get it back.

Getting back into the groove of building, intensely, took months. In those months, with nothing to obsess over, I got addicted to 𝕏. Everyday was filled with hours of scrolling, reposting, and writing to raise the spirits of my community. But each day I was losing my peace, bit by bit. I was shutting myself off from divine inspiration that, historically, in my case, came from silence, fasting, and detachment. Not that those are the only ways to receive the muse, but you need to create space. Be bored. Be ready to receive. Patient.

I made some progress rebuilding Caravan’s architecture from a cloud-based data model to an offline-first model. I built a better authentication system. And I also rebuilt the text editor into a much more enjoyable, minimal interface. Customers told me these were the problems. So I fixed them. The list is long, and I still have a long way ahead.

Building just those features should not have taken 5 months. But it did because every day I took one step in the direction of progress and a hundred steps in the direction of brain-rot social media.

At the start of this week, I decided to restrict 𝕏 to the weekend and disengage, a bit, from a great group chat I’m in (The Pit) to focus entirely on Caravan Notes.

It was great.

I set up my Testflight environment, finalized the auth system to work smoothly on Mac, iOS, and Web, and started making meaningful progress on the unified payment system for both iOS and Web. By next week, my payment system and data model for subscription tracking will be done.

The game is afoot. My goal is to build Caravan Notes to $1M in monthly recurring revenue, and I will post these progress reports every week until I get there. My ultimate goal in life is to write the blueprint on how to build a business from scratch that makes enough money to give its owner the freedom to live any lifestyle they want, with enough leftover for charity and legacy.

Until next week. Much love,

Zaid