Last week, a new member of my team, Palak, told me the thing I’d built didn’t work the way I said it did.
She’d been using the Companion.
She typed it different things, and it gave her back almost the same answer two or three times. So she did what any real person does. She closed it and decided to come back to it later. And then, because she wanted me and our team to be aware of this, she told me.
There was a fleeting moment where the old me wanted to explain to her why it had responded this way.
I wanted to defend myself and what I’d built by telling her why it behaved this way instead of hearing the person in front of me.
And I didn’t do it. I realised that she’s right. We’re too far inside this to see it. We needed her precisely because she’s new to the Companion.
I was thinking about this moment all week. And because I turn 50 in a few weeks, I’ve also been thinking about what this strange year of building in public has actually taught me.
And the same word keeps surfacing. Trust.
Here is what I used to believe about trust.
I honestly believed people would trust me if I looked like I had it figured out. If what I created looked polished and perfect. If I never showed them parts that were real and unglamorous.
After all, as a “good girl”, I learned early to be liked rather than seen, to always have the right answer and to never let anyone catch me not knowing.
So when I first built the Companion, I built it the way a good girl builds things.
I tried to have a backup plan in place for every scenario I could envision. I created a hundred prompts.
And I was so busy making it competent that I almost made it ineffective as a Companion that reflects back how you are actually doing.
Because a thing that has an answer for everything cannot hold space for anything. I had to tweak and build parts of it again, smaller, quieter and more willing to say nothing.
Most of all, building in public meant I had to do that where people could see what was working and what was not.
In fact, I've written about building the Companion wrong the first time, with the hundred prompts and the backup plan I’d created for every scenario. I thought I'd rebuilt my way out of it, but Palak told me I hadn't entirely.
Mostly, I was terrified that people would trust me less. It turned out to be exactly backwards. They trusted me more.
Because here is what I think is actually true, and what it took me until almost-fifty to feel in my body:
people are not looking for someone with no flaws. They are exhausted by people who seem to be perfect.
The women who find their way to me have spent years being told exactly what they needed. The doctor who was sure about a cure, the protocol that promised sustainable health, the wellness guru with the five clean steps for fixing their gut health, this level of certainty kept failing them.
And, it made them trust themselves less every time it didn’t work.
So when someone finally says I don’t have an answer to that and means it without being ashamed of it that comes as a relief.
Because finally they meet someone who isn’t trying to perform an authority they don’t have.
I think this is why I built the Companion the way I did.
It doesn’t pretend. When it doesn’t have something true to reflect back, it says less, not more. It will never give you a confident, polished, wrong answer just to keep you comfortable.
There’s a version of AI being built everywhere right now that is designed to please you — to agree, to flatter, to keep you on the app.
I built the opposite.
Sometimes mine will frustrate you, the way Palak was frustrated, because it won’t fix you and it certainly won’t perform for you.
The answer has to come from you.
I’d rather build something honest that occasionally disappoints you than something charming that quietly makes you smaller.
That’s a strange thing to want to be true of a piece of technology. But it’s the same thing I want to be true of me.
Forty-nine has been the year of building with the door open. Every wrong turn I made visible. Every iteration that I shared online.
One founding member instead of the twenty-five I’d imagined. The protocol I had to dismantle and build again. The bug a new teammate caught that I’d been too close to see.
None of it is the perfect version. Yet all of it is the true one.
And I’ve watched something happen that I didn’t expect. The trust didn’t come despite the mess. It actually came because of it.
People don’t trust the version of you that has it all together. They trust the version of you that tells them the truth, including the truth about what you don’t yet know.
I’m about to turn 50. I’ve spent a lot of my life believing I had to earn belonging by having all the right answers.
And really the great, late, slightly funny lesson of this year is that the cracks were never the problem.
As Leonard Cohen said, the cracks are where the light gets in.
So if you’re building anything, whether a business, a body’s healing, a different relationship with yourself and you think you have to wait until it’s polished to let anyone see it:
I want to gently tell you that you have it backwards, the way I did. The polish is not what builds trust. Honesty is.
Let them see the cracks. The light that gets through is precisely where the trust gets in.
I turn 50 this August. Not a number to hit — just a reason to open the door, quietly and invite a few women ready to come home to themselves.
The Coming Home Circle opens again this August, with the Companion at its heart. If your name is on the waitlist, you’ll hear first.
