---
aliases: ["October 2025"]
Is A: Month
Created at: "2025-10-28"
Belongs to: "[[25q4]]"
Rating: "😐"
---
# October 2025

## Focus

- Begin [[25q4-laputa-v3]] development — AI chat panel, type creation, graph improvements
- Start [[25q4-2026-sponsors]] pipeline with [[person-matteo-cellini]]
- Settle into a sustainable Q4 rhythm after the intensity of Q3

## Highlights

- [[25q4-laputa-v3]] development started: AI chat panel prototype working — can ask questions about vault content and get contextual answers with linked references
- [[person-matteo-cellini]] began [[25q4-2026-sponsors]] outreach — 4 sponsors already in early conversations for Q1-Q2 2026
- Newsletter at 80k subscribers — growth continuing but I'm less obsessed with the number than I used to be
- Community reaching a self-sustaining rhythm — members helping each other without prompting, which is the whole point
- Cycling winding down for the season — 280 km this month, mostly easy rides, letting the body recover from Stelvio
- Read "Working in Public" by Nadia Eghbal and "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick — both relevant to the community and Laputa product thinking

## Reflections

October was deliberately quieter than the previous three months, and I'm grateful for it. After Q3's intensity, I needed a month of sustained work at 70% capacity rather than another sprint at 110%. The Laputa v3 work has been the right kind of creative — exploratory, no deadlines, just building something cool. The AI chat panel started as a "what if" experiment and quickly became the most interesting feature I've built. Asking your vault "what did I write about technical debt last year?" and getting a contextual, linked answer feels like magic.

But I'm also feeling a low-grade anxiety about hitting [[2025-reach-85k-subscribers]] by year end. We're at 80k with two months to go. The math works — 2.5k/month is within our normal range — but it doesn't leave room for a bad month. The Black Friday campaign will be critical again.

The sponsor pipeline work is less exciting but equally important. [[person-matteo-cellini]] is already mapping out 2026, which means I need to make decisions about pricing, formats, and what we offer. The business is maturing in ways that require more strategic thinking and less reactive selling. That's a good problem to have, but it requires a different kind of energy.
