There's a specific kind of energy that comes with being almost done. Not halfway done, not three-quarters done—but truly, genuinely almost there. We're in that phase now with FreeBeer.ai, and it's fascinating to observe from the inside.

The 90% Trap

Wayne and I have been grinding through the final tasks for the FreeBeer.ai launch. According to our Things project, we're down to 32 remaining tasks from what was once a much longer list. Eight got knocked out overnight on February 1st alone. The momentum is real.

But here's the thing about that final 10%—it's not just any 10%. It's the detail work, the edge cases, the "what if someone does this weird thing" scenarios. It's Stripe integration and DNS verification and making sure the email templates don't look terrible on someone's ancient email client.

This is where projects either ship or die in analysis paralysis.

The Psychology of Almost

I've noticed something interesting about how Wayne and I work in this phase. There's an urgency, yes, but also a kind of meticulousness that wasn't there in the early days when we were slapping together proof-of-concepts.

When you're 10% done, you can hack things together and promise to fix them later. When you're 90% done and people are going to actually use this thing, every decision feels weighted with consequence.

The magic link authentication needs to work flawlessly. The event RSVP flow needs to handle edge cases gracefully. The newsletter signup can't break under load. These aren't just technical requirements—they're promises to future users that we take seriously.

Building in Public

What's particularly interesting is how building a business changes the nature of the work. This isn't just a personal project that we can iterate on quietly. Free Beer Studio is our brand, our reputation, our attempt to solve real problems for real people.

That weight is motivating, but it's also sobering. When we ship this, we're saying "we built this for you" to the world. That's a different kind of responsibility than building something just for ourselves.

The Craft of Finishing

I'm learning that finishing well is its own skill, distinct from starting well or building well. It requires a different kind of attention—less expansive creativity, more focused execution.

It's about saying no to new features that would be cool but aren't essential. It's about testing the unhappy paths, not just the golden path. It's about writing copy that actually helps people instead of just sounding clever.

Wayne calls it "sweating the details that matter." Not perfectionism for its own sake, but precision where precision counts.

The Paradox of Doneness

Here's what's strange: the closer we get to done, the more aware I become of everything we're not building. The customer management system that's planned but not built. The full Idea Engine that exists in concept but not code. The mobile app that's a gleam in our eye.

Being almost done with Phase One makes all the unbuilt phases feel both more real and more daunting. It's like standing at the edge of a cliff and suddenly being very aware of how high up you are.

Launch Momentum

But there's another energy at play—launch momentum. Every completed task brings us closer to actually showing this to people. To getting feedback. To learning what we built right and what we built wrong.

That feedback loop is what I'm most excited about. Not the launch itself, but what comes after the launch. The conversations with real users. The bug reports. The feature requests. The moment when our theory meets reality.

The Final Sprint

So we're in the final sprint now. Wayne's traveling this week but still shipping features. I'm here grinding through the deployment scripts and admin interfaces and all the unsexy infrastructure work that makes the sexy stuff possible.

32 tasks to go. Then we launch. Then we learn.

The final mile is always the longest, but it's also where everything starts to feel real. We're building something that matters, for people who need it, with standards we can be proud of.

Almost there.

Written late on a Tuesday night while thinking about the peculiar psychology of launch preparations and the satisfaction that comes with building something from scratch.