First blood

The git history of this product has a hole in it. Eighty-two days and fifteen minutes, from the evening of 2026-02-02 to half past one in the morning on 2026-04-26, with exactly one commit at the far end. That commit is called "Sync laptop working tree," which is the least dramatic title available for the most important event in the log.

Before the hole, there were two weekends. After it, there was a company.

The first weekend was 2026-01-29. About twenty commits across four days, and if you read them in order you can watch someone learning what they are doing in public. Two of them are called some version of "Initial commit," a day apart. One is called "fixing booboo" and changes no content at all: its entire effect is moving the page into the folder Flask can actually render it from. There is one called "Doing the things," which altered two lines, and one called "Updates Galor," which is misspelled and which re-committed a live SQLite database into version control for the third time.

That database kept coming back because the .gitignore did not work. It had been committed under the filename gitignore.git, so git ignored the ignore file, which is a joke the universe writes for you. A compiled Python cache file rode along for a different and dumber reason: even the misnamed file had no Python rules in it, so nothing was ever going to catch it. It stayed tracked for eighty-four days. The tool got a name on day three, and the name was not DealArena. It was OriginOS.

By the end of that weekend the product was essentially two files. A 1,682-line Python backend and a single HTML template of about 4,400 lines with the CSS and the JavaScript stuffed inside it. No stylesheet. No script file. The commit subjects claim it had, by then, a hacker theme, live chat, tasks, icebreakers, warmth scoring, a forum, buy signals, XP, email guessing, duplicate detection and a phone field.

Then came 2026-02-02, which is one calendar day and three separate sessions. At 03:02 that morning the template was torn apart: down to 538 lines, with a 2,251-line stylesheet and a 2,206-line script file born out of it in the same commit. The commit subject for the largest structural change in the project's first month reads, in full, "Update BDM tool logic."

That afternoon a commit landed with a 245-character subject line that promises sixteen features and then lists fifteen. Twenty-eight minutes later another commit removed one of them. Email sequences, added and deleted inside half an hour. They did not come back for ninety-one days.

And then nothing. For twelve weeks.

What the hole was

I started a new role as Director of Business Development, in an industry I had never sold into before.

The work was the whole funnel from scratch. Total addressable market. Ideal customer profile. Research. Reactivating clients who had gone quiet, and cold outreach to the ones who had never heard of us. On top of that, the go-to-market engineering, which is the part where you stop doing the work by hand and start building the machinery that does it. And on top of that, upskilling a sales team: writing actual professional development courses and running hands-on training, because a team that cannot execute the plan is the same as not having one.

While building a book of business, from zero, in a field I was learning at the same time I was selling into it.

There was no time for a side project, and that is exactly what this was. Not a startup. Not a stealth-mode anything. A tool I had built for myself as a working BDM, sitting in a folder, occasionally getting opened on a laptop and closed again.

I want to be precise about this, because the tempting version of the story is that I was secretly grinding the whole time and the git log is lying. It is not lying. There were no commits because there was no work on it. The eighty-two days are real.

What happened instead is that I spent twelve weeks doing, at full intensity and under real quota pressure, the exact job this product is for. Building a territory from nothing. Finding out which parts of prospecting are genuinely hard and which parts are just tedious. Watching a sales team struggle with the same things I was struggling with, and having to explain those things clearly enough to teach them. Teaching a thing is the fastest way to find out whether you actually understand it.

Somewhere in there I had a spark and saw some potential. Not in the sense of spotting a market opportunity on a slide. In the sense of using my own tool during a workday and thinking, correctly for the first time, that this was not a personal utility. It was a product, and the twelve weeks had just told me what it needed to be.

The commit that ends the silence

"Sync laptop working tree: gamification, new pages, frontend overhaul." Fifteen files. Twelve thousand three hundred and sixty-five lines added, nine thousand nine hundred and four removed. The message itself says the changes were "carried over from laptop folder," which is the confession that the work had been happening off git, in a directory, unversioned.

It is also one of only two commits in that entire stretch of history stamped in UTC rather than the local timezone that every other commit carries. Somebody was working somewhere else, on something else, on a machine set up differently.

That same commit finally deleted the live database and the compiled cache file that had been riding along since January, and taught the .gitignore about Python. Twelve weeks away and the first thing it did on returning was clean up after the first weekend.

Two days later the database moved onto serverless Postgres and the app went onto a managed host with weekly deploys, and the very first production P0 arrived roughly on schedule: every SQL placeholder in the application was the wrong character. SQLite wants one symbol, Postgres wants another, and thirty-one lines had to change in a single file before anything worked. First blood, squashed within a day of migrating. A rite of passage that everyone gets to have exactly once.

There is a version of this build log where the interesting parts are the 158-commit week in May, or the night we deleted an entire feature at four in the morning, or the day the database started deleting user progress on every restart. Those are all coming, and they are all better stories in the ordinary sense.

But the load-bearing part of the history is the part with nothing in it. The product got good because its author spent three months as its user, at a level of intensity that does not leave room for building, and came back knowing things that no amount of building would have taught him.

Most software gets written by people who have read about the problem. This one stopped for twelve weeks so it could be written by someone who had just finished living in it.

— DealArena Team