Welcome to Issue 22 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about a good brand move that helped grow a small business. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.)

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Hello Reader,

I know I’m not the only one guilty of looking for shortcuts when craving clarity. Of longing for that one good idea to strike—that instant breakthrough.

I want to think it’s not my fault.

That I’m just a product of a society that conditions us to be constantly productive. Like most humans, I want to use my limited time efficiently to make meaningful progress towards my goals.

But how can I do that without certainty about what those goals are? That I’m prioritizing the right idea? And if I don’t land—and swiftly act—on the thing, someone else might.

Ugh, I need to figure it out faster.

Or, maybe…it just feels that way? Maybe that urgency is the real illusion.

Because here’s what I’m slowly starting to accept and internalize about good ideas:

The best ones don’t arrive fully formed.

They need time to grow, space to evolve, and even permission to wither before their true shape emerges.

Like the bonsai trees my boyfriend obsessively tends, they require patience, care, and constant pruning to grow into something magnificent.

For most of us, clarity and brilliant breakthroughs aren’t moments of divine inspiration. They happen after years of working on them. Of iterating, testing, and refining.

It’s a process. And embracing that process while bringing others along for the ride could be your biggest advantage.

This is the essence of building in public.

You’ve probably heard the term before, but its true power might still surprise you.

And if you haven’t heard of Sari Azout and her startup, Sublime, her story is the best example of effectively building a business (a movement, really) in public I've come across.

Still in beta, Sublime has already blossomed into a thriving community, with 1,000 paying customers and a waitlist of 30,000 eager to join.

To some, it may seem like an overnight success.

But those who’ve followed Sari’s journey know it’s been years in the making—years of publicly wrestling with ideas, inviting others to join her vision, and slowly shaping something that taps into our universal craving for a deeper connection.

Something that embraces slow, thoughtful progress in a world obsessed with quick wins.

It’s a testament to an approach that doesn’t just build things people like—it builds things people love.

A Good Story

Sari was a bookish kid into reading and big ideas, though she felt limited growing up in her tiny town outside of Barranquilla, Columbia.

She distinctly remembers when the internet came about. Suddenly, her world expanded.

She discovered TED Talks and binged on ideas the way other kids her age binged on dessert. To her, the internet wasn’t just technology—it was a portal to connect with the outside world.

That portal eventually led her to the U.S., where she navigated a career that started in banking and led her to launch her first startup at age 21.

Her first big idea was a marketplace for second-hand clothing. She was into fashion, to an extent. But what she was really interested in was exploring ways to use technology to connect people.

While it wasn’t "the thing", the experience gave Sari a crash course in business building and opened a lot of doors that led to her involvement in the startup space.

By 2020, Sari had spent nearly a decade in venture capital. But like many of us during that year, she started questioning her path.

Advising from the top meant she wasn’t getting her hands dirty in the work and seeing the direct impact of her projects. She felt disconnected from her mission and needed an outlet to explore ideas that were nagging at her.

What was once a love affair with the internet turned into something she no longer recognized. She felt like the experience of being online had become binary—either you’re alone in your notes app or broadcasting to a social media audience.

Surely, she thought, there's a better way.

So, she started a Substack newsletter as an outlet to follow her curiosity.

At the same time, she started collecting and creating a little personal database of other people’s ideas, quotes, and snippets of things she found interesting or through-provoking.

She became fascinated by this concept of externalizing memory.

What if, she wrote in her fast-growing newsletter, we had a tool that allowed us to collect and connect ideas in a way that felt equal parts personal and communal? An interface that would allow us to feel alone, but together.

One day, she wrote about having this nagging feeling that this personal database—this knowledge library—should be multiplayer in some way. In this newsletter (and subsequent Tweet) she called it a “community curated knowledge network.”

And that’s the idea that took off.

​The piece went viral, validating that there was something there there. But what came next was just as important:

She invited her readers to join her in a journey to build it.

A Good Approach

A couple of weeks after her knowledge network idea went viral, Sari sent a note to her 10,000 newsletter subscribers with a bold proposal:

For $120, you could get access to her personal knowledge library and be part of the journey as she transformed this seedling of an idea into a full-fledged product.

Over 400 people signed up, giving her $50,000 in revenue and clear validation that this wasn’t just an interesting concept—it was a real, solvable problem that people were willing to pay for.

The next year was filled with tinkering and iteration. Sari worked with her early supporters to refine the idea into something that felt both personal and communal.

Slowly, the database evolved into Sublime: a platform where you can save, share, and build on ideas.

But the magic of Sublime wasn’t (and isn’t) just its functionality—it’s the ethos behind why it exists and who it’s for.

As Sari puts it, Sublime is for people who don’t want the process of building a knowledge library to “spiral into a tyrannical chore.” For anyone seeking creativity and simplicity, not productivity and efficiency.

It’s for the people who crave online spaces that “quiet the mind and let inspiration flow.” The collectors, connecters, and idea sharers.

Without that ethos, Sublime could’ve ended up as just another bookmarking tool.

While Sari’s mission of creating an internet that feels less lonely was always clear, the how—the platform and product that allows you to curate on your own, but be part of a collective—came with time.

And because she was so open to sharing her process, her values, and her vision with readers, it also came with plenty of feedback.

How, exactly, did she approach it?

By publishing internal memos, publicly expressing the messy and confusing parts of articulating a lofty, abstract new concept, and explaining what problem the product solves for her.

To this day, everything Sari writes always reads like a personal note from the founder to the reader—because that’s all it is.

And every time, she requests a response. She asks readers: “What do you connect with? What feels off? What’s missing?”

It’s one of the best examples of building in public I’ve ever seen. And, as an organic and authentic brand-building approach, it’s paid off.

Sublime's more than 7,000 active members—1,000 of which are already paying customers—and additional 30,000 people ready to use the product when it launches publicly in Q1 of 2025, are proof.

None of it, Sari says, would be possible without the years of earring trust by putting everything out on the table—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

A Good Takeaway

I remember feeling convinced and confident that I had found my “thing” when I launched my now-defunct food blog in 2017.

I left journalism and went to culinary school with a mission to carve a new path. I wanted to launch a business less reliant on the computer and do something with my hands.

It was a business venture that finally clicked—one that brought all of my skillsets and passion beautifully together.

After two years of good effort and quick success, I realized I made the wrong choice. For various reasons, cooking, writing, and building a community around it all wasn’t my thing. (And it certainly didn’t allow me to get off my computer.)

But it was the thing that led to the next thing and the next thing that helped me find my way here.

I've learned, to an extent, that it's a process.

When I started this newsletter, I just started. I knew I wanted to explore people’s stories again, but I didn’t know where it would go. I'm still very much in that process.

If Sari hadn’t started her Substack years ago, Sublime wouldn’t exist today.

And while her story isn’t what most people want to hear, the message that there are no shortcuts to hard-won insights is one that actually makes me feel a touch of relief.

It takes some of the pressure off the feeling that we need to have it all figured out in this moment. That we need to land on the perfect positioning or pitch or brand or offer.

It's comforting to remember that it’s all an evolution. And that your efforts build on each other.

As creators and business owners who are chronically online, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of chasing productivity, efficiency, and instant feedback.

But the best breakthroughs don’t come from figuring out the best strategy—they come from showing up, sharing honestly, and letting your ideas take root.

So whether you write on Substack, post on TikTok, or share updates on LinkedIn, to me the biggest takeaway is remembering that the process is the story.

It’s the messy in-between—the building, the iterating, the struggling, and the breakthroughs—that people are drawn to.

So, plant that seed. Share your idea. Invite others along for the journey.

And most importantly:

Give it the time, space, and reflection it needs to grow.

A Few Good Resources

1. Want to join Sublime's beta? Here's a special link to sign up.
2. Need more of a "how" exactly? Here's a practical guide to building in public. (But I think you got this.)
3. I love how Brene Brown is always brave enough to say what we're all feeling.

Hope you have a good one,
Renee