a note on starting.

It always starts with the cursor. Blinking. Waiting. A quiet challenge to be brilliant on the first try.

For years, my digital life has been a graveyard of brilliant first tries. A folder named “projects,” filled with ideas that never saw the light of day. Sketches for apps, a few lines of a poem, a voice note humming a melody, a half-finished blog post. Each one started with a spark, then stalled under the weight of a single question: “Is this good enough to show anyone?”

The internet we’ve built is obsessed with the “after” photo. The finished product. The polished portfolio. The perfect launch. We celebrate the destination, but we’ve hidden the journey — the messy, frustrating, beautiful, non-linear path of actually making something.

I started to wonder, what are we losing by only sharing the things that are done?

We lose the context. We lose the humanity. We lose the truth that genius isn’t a lightning strike; it’s a process. It’s the ugly sketch that comes before the masterpiece. It’s the broken code that teaches you how the system really works. It’s the C-minus draft that hides one perfect sentence.

firstDraft was born from a simple need: I wanted a place for my own unfinished work. A home for the ideas that weren’t ready for a pitch deck or a public repository. A space where the process was the point, and progress was the only metric that mattered. A workbench, not a gallery.

This isn’t another social network. It’s not a tool for performance. It’s a quiet corner of the internet for you to prove to yourself that you’re making. A place to connect the dots between your own scattered thoughts.

It’s for anyone who’s ever felt the pressure to be perfect and chosen to be in-progress instead.