during my cello lessons, my professor would play a passage so i could hear it, he would play so beautifully that i kept thinking: this is all worth it, because one day i could do that. i could enjoy the song by also playing (even though my cello sound wasn’t that good)
i picked my favorite song, Time by Hans Zimmer. you might go into a “WOW” effect but stop: the one video that made me realize i want to learn that song was this one:
so an orchestra that had cellos and violins, trust me, i would have never allowed myself to want to learn cello if I had started from this video:
the mastery of Tina and Hans is just divine. i could never.
the whole thing began in a coffee shop in Kosovo, i was working, listening to classical music, when i started noticing the cello in one of the pieces. then i remembered: my cello professor was here, i’d taken two or three lessons with him about two years ago.
i messaged him, we arranged two hours a day for a week, and he brought me a cello to keep at home during that time.
music has been with me for a long time, my mom is a music teacher, and practiced 2 hrs a day on piano throughout her life, do note, i woke up to this song kind of every single day:
to the point that from “hate” i went through this transition to love the song, and i would even ask her to play it for me.
when i was five or six, i wanted to sing so much, learn instruments, and so on, she introduced me to her high school friend who at the time was the music school director with the idea that we might create a song for a festival.
it never happened. but i remember how excited she was, and how much fun it was to imagine myself as a singer.
now i was making room for music again, i stopped other things to practice, mind you i didn’t care about any ai these days.
alongside these lessons, i’ve been trying to make room for my creative work again, too.
What I’m trying to make happen
I’ve been traveling a lot. lately, it has felt as though im running away from the creative projects i keep saying matter to me.
right now, im rebuilding my rhythm of making videos. i want to use them to meet the people who might use what im building, hear their responses, and gradually create an audience that cares enough to come back
but i also care about the videos themselves. a video can feel like a living thing to me. those first few seconds can do smth in your stomach. you feel smth, you want a little more, and suddently you’re inside a world someone is making.
thats the kind of work i want to make.
a friend recently noticed how i relaxed into his questions when i talked about my project. i liked recognizing that in myself: i could talk about the work and feel connected to it.
that experience is close to what i want people to have with pitchrotator.
you spent time building something, you know its details, its strange edges, the decisions behind it. i want to help you practice explaining it, so that someone else can begin to understand what you see in it.
the experience im working toward is simple: record yourself talking about your work, get one thing you did well and one thing to improve, then try again. i want you to recognize yourself in your voice and delivery, and feel more able to have a conversation about what you’re making.
you bring the technical depth, the subject,t he things you’ve been exploring. the practice helps you put them into words.
here’s where the product stands:
What exists: a simple MCP integration that uses traces of someone’s work to build a profile, and a practice interface that offers one thing done well and one thing to work on next.
What I’m figuring out: how to connect those work traces to useful speaking prompts. perhaps a question about a project you’ve been developing, or a reminder of something you spent hours on and never shared.
What I’m designing alongside it: a seven-day challenge around practicing how you explain your work
I keep getting stuck on a question: who am i to design this challenge when my own videos aren’t getting much traction?
It sends me back to the videos, then back to the offer. i still need to find out whether the practice us useful to someone. can i learn that while im learning how to negotiate?
The feature is built
while co-working with a friend, we started talking about showing the apps’ experience on the landing page. that gave me an idea: use my video of myself pitching with my own pitch app.
i built the feature, then i delayed publishing it. i wanted a really good pitch, the right setting, …
the thought i didn’t say out loud was that i was good with the existing video. i could use it, publish, and keep iterating.
this is where i keep returning to the cello lesson.
with the cello, i knew the song i wanted to learn. I could give two hours to practicing it. with my work, the next step seems to open into another set of steps. there’s another tool, another approach, another way to make the experience better.
and behind all of that are the goals i care about: more than 500 people using the app daily, and a product that generates revenue. those are goals im working toward. im still far from them.
at the time of writing, my next step is to bublish the new landing page with the video i already have. see it here
https://pitchrotator.com/
im also working out how this newsletter can hold both parts of my life: the experiences that make me want to create, and the actual decisions, experiments, and unfinished work that follow.
in my last essay, i wrote about wanting things without knowing what i was moving toward. i still have questions about that, but i can name something i want to do next, and i have something ready to share.
what’s one project you’ve spent time on that you still find difficult to explain to someone new? reply and tell me where you get stuck, cheers