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I built a forum for Kosshi
Oct 2, 2026I can reply at my own pace, and other people can read the conversation too. After running the Kosshi forum for a few months, I'm glad I made it.
#KosshiWe showed a mushroom robot and Sankome at Hakubutsu Festa
Aug 12, 2026I looked into what makes an object feel alive, then built a faceless mushroom robot that expresses itself through movement.
#Sankome#Electronics#Hakubutsu FesI dropped the contact form and put up my email
Jun 13, 2026I changed my contact form to just my email address. As I thought about it, I ended up somewhere I didn't expect. For a solo developer, trust isn't in the company. It's in the person making the thing.
#KosshiI started a newsletter for Kosshi
Jun 7, 2026I had no way to reach the people using Kosshi, so I started a newsletter. But running several products means one list turns every update into noise for someone. Here's how I split it by topic, and what I bumped into on the way.
#Kosshi#NewsletterKosshi feedback has been pouring in lately
May 30, 2026Lately, the feedback coming in through Kosshi's contact form has been getting a bit wild. An overseas blog and a thread on outlinersoftware.com brought in a wave of new users, and it became clear that right now isn't the phase to spread it further, but the phase to fix things.
#KosshiShowed a mini Sankome at Design Festa 63
May 25, 2026Naoyoshi had a booth at Design Festa 63, a big Tokyo indie art and craft fair. I sent along a mini Sankome printed with Ohaco, the 3D builder I'm working on. It got a better response than I'd expected.
#Ohaco#Sankome#Design FestaPutting Kosshi on Product Hunt turned out pretty well
May 25, 2026Barely anyone outside Japan was using Kosshi. I put it on Product Hunt as a first step toward reaching beyond Japan, and the response turned out better than I'd expected.
#Kosshi#Product HuntGenerating App Store screenshots in nine languages with Remotion
May 21, 2026Kosshi barely got downloaded outside Japan, and when I looked into it, it was hardly showing up in any store at all. So I rebuilt its App Store screenshots, nine languages' worth, from code, with Remotion.
#RemotionEditing video by writing code is more fun than I thought
May 20, 2026I was building an explainer video for Kosshi with Remotion, and the codebase quietly grew to 12,572 lines. Seeing 'refactor' commits in a video repo turned out to be more fun than I'd imagined.
#RemotionAdding Japanese to Kosshi turned into nine languages
May 17, 2026When I added a Japanese UI to my own app, it felt like a more visible bump in daily use than any of the small fixes I'd been making recently. My weakness in English may, oddly enough, have ended up working in my favor.
#KosshiWhen weekends stop being a concept
May 14, 2026A note on how weekends and holidays stopped being concepts for me. I'm probably sitting in the front row to take the hit from AI, and somehow this is still the most fun stretch of life I've had.
#FreelanceTools for makers need serious UX
May 13, 2026Something I noticed while making tools for makers. The users take their tools seriously, so what looks like a UX problem turns out to need real engineering underneath.
#MakingI'm not good at self-promotion, but I want to keep writing.
May 11, 2026I'd half-resigned myself to being bad at promoting my work. Then, re-reading old blogs by makers I love, I noticed: what I'm drawn to isn't the products. It's the writing. The writing part, I think I can keep at.
#WritingThe Bear Who Couldn't Make: A Picture Book
May 10, 2026Naoyoshi and I made a picture book about a bear who couldn't make anything anymore, and what brought him back to making.
#Picture BookOutliners turned out to be way more computer science than they look
May 6, 2026From the outside, an outliner is just bullet points. From the inside, it's data structures and algorithms. Something I noticed while building Kosshi.
#KosshiWhat I wanted was the process, not the product
May 5, 2026I had been saying I wanted to build Sankome, but maybe what I wanted was not the finished robot. It may have been the process of making one. That question led me to Ohaco.
#Sankome#OhacoKosshi took me four years to ship
May 4, 2026The app I quit my job to build sat in my head for four years before I finally shipped it.
#Kosshi