The Brief

Medium Feel was always meant to be a lab and repository, a place to document experiments in brand and marketing as AI reshapes both. But when I first tried building this site a year ago with a few AI tools, I gave up. The platforms were cumbersome and inflexible. I put up a landing page on Squarespace and called it a day.

That placeholder sat there for a year, not doing much of anything. I wanted something live that reflected where Medium Feel is actually headed. Not a polished portfolio. A lab. A place to build in public.

The Constraints
  • One half-day to ship
  • No coding experience
  • Free hosting (GitHub Pages)
  • Single HTML file, no frameworks
  • Working within Claude Pro rate limits
  • Visual assets generated with OpenAI and Gemini (placeholders for now)
The Sprint
Discovery

I'd heard enough people without coding experience insisting Claude Code was worth the low barrier to entry. That the distance between idea and execution was shrinking fast. So I went for it.

I've been in the habit of taking walks in the woods behind my house with my dog, using Granola or TwinMinds to record myself brainstorming out loud. Sometimes I leave it on for over an hour. I become pretty unjudgmental about my thoughts. Often the notes and takeaways from the apps are enough, but I've also built a few GPTs that process my transcriptions and organize them in ways I find useful.

Walking in the winter woods
Where a lot of the thinking happens

I took a few of these brain dumps, along with my resume, and pointed Claude at my previous Squarespace site. I asked it to digest everything and help me build something I could host for free elsewhere.

What it came back with, hosted locally on my computer, blew me away.

Build

Working in Claude Code, you don't have the luxury of saving or seeing your history in Terminal the way you might expect. So I've been using Claude's chat interface for anything not directly related to building or making changes to the website. I ran prompts to help me define an MVP, build out a launch plan, and structure the iterations ahead.

I used Opus 4.5, which is melting my mind, as seems to be the case almost everywhere right now.

The site is a single HTML file. No frameworks, no build tools. The visual assets are all AI-generated placeholders. Like the site itself, the look and feel of Medium Feel will undergo iterative development. My hunch is that what constitutes brand management or brand governance will be far more fluid than it used to be. This site is a chance to test that.

Ship

And here we are. The MVP is live. A transitional site, a kernel, something to build on. The shape, feel, and function will all grow and change while amassing documentation. Anchoring progress with memory of what preceded.

This site is the first documented experiment of Medium Feel.

The Retro
Keep
  • Timeboxing. I gave myself a half-day. That constraint forced decisions.
  • Framing it as "transitional." I didn't have to get it perfect. I had to get it live.
  • Using voice memos and transcription to generate raw material. It lowers the friction of starting.
Drop
  • Deliberating about where, when, and why for too long before starting. I could have shipped months ago if I'd committed to iteration earlier.
Try
  • Documenting as I go, not after the fact. I regret not capturing more of the last year's experiments. This space is where I fix that.
  • Testing AI visibility strategies on my own site. I've been implementing them for clients. Time to experiment here.
What's Next

This site will evolve. The brand will evolve. Built in iterations.

Next up: blog infrastructure, so these posts have a proper home. More writing. More experiments. Moving cards from "Building" to "Shipped."

The gap between idea and execution is shrinking by the day. This project is my way of learning what's possible as I continue to pursue excellence in brand and marketing ops.

Backstory

About a year and a half ago I began retooling, reentering the marketing world after a family sabbatical. I had the privilege of being home with my two kids, the youngest now six and in first grade. My marketing and brand lens stayed engaged (I don't love being marketed to as a parent) and as I started taking certifications from HubSpot and Google Analytics, my use of AI to get caught up on trends very quickly became the subject of inquiry itself.

Taking a cert on GA4, learning the opaque nomenclature intended to keep the black box requiring trained experts to operate, I realized it would soon have to make way for the natural language interactions AI was enabling.

The journey over the last year has been intense and intensely valuable. In pursuit of full-time brand and project management work, my use of AI in the retooling process turned into project and consulting work: helping small businesses, agencies, and nonprofits integrate AI, promote AI literacy, and streamline marketing operations. I've coached individuals on auditing and streamlining their own workflows. I've stayed engaged, following and trying out all kinds of AI-enabled platforms.

I regret not doing a better job of documenting so much of this process. With this space, I hope to rectify that.