Tom Turcotte

I've spent the last 5 years mentoring developers, helping them ship code and build careers. But when it came to growing my own presence on X, I was stuck: endless scrolling, forced content, zero flow. So I quietly shifted focus: diving full-time into building X Growth Engine, a tool that handles post creation, smart scouting, and targeted engagement... all while keeping your authentic voice intact. Today marks Day 1 of sharing the journey openly. Excited (and a little nervous) to document the progress, failures, and wins. #buildinpublic

278 days, counted in the clip. Day 200, Day 243, Day 255, Day 266. The grid fills, the anchors ring, the count climbs. That is what it looks like from where I sit.

What X Growth Engine does: Finds conversations in your niche you'd never have seen. Reads them and says why each one matters. Gives you three angles to answer from. What it will never do: Write the reply. Send it. Run a list of jobs overnight and call that your growth. Three product calls yesterday, one rule underneath them. The finding can be automated. The reply has to be yours. I could build the other version. It would demo better and do less for you. Day 280

The post that did best in 90 days, now in video. 698 impressions, 51 engagements, all of it from talking to people in the replies. The clip is the argument: what they shipped, what got hard, what they are stuck on

I want to meet a few specific people. You post what you're building while it's still ugly. You answer your own replies. You'd rather ship something small than describe something big. There's one thing you're still fighting and you can't put it down. That's the filter. I build X Growth Engine, and the people who fit that list are the ones who taught me the most. Tell me what you're building and the part that isn't working. I'll answer every one. If it's interesting I'll follow along, and you'll probably hear from me again. Day 279

I wrote this one as a post in October. It reads better at 17 seconds. My own product got heavy at 40,000 posts. You find that wall by walking into it. The clip shows both halves.

A check came back clean last night and I believed it. It had read zero commits. I pointed it at the wrong folder and never asked what it actually scanned. I built the check, so the pass was mine to question. I did not question it. Now it fails when it reads nothing, and that pass cannot happen again. Agents are fun. Day 278

"The field mouse is fast, but the owl sees at night." A joke from a racing comedy, and the shortest honest version of what I've been doing here for 277 days. Every tool I use made me faster this year. None of them told me where to look. The dark doesn't care how fast you are.

One writer, two posts. Same shape. Four lines against three. The one that hit, 791 likes: "My prediction for software engineering over the next 3 to 5 years. AI won't replace software engineers. It'll drive even greater demand for them. A team of 5 experienced engineers using AI will outperform a team of 20 pre-AI." Same writer, an ordinary day, 18 likes: "Writing code is a skill. Software engineering is the discipline of turning messy, underspecified problems into reliable outcomes, implemented as code. Yes, AI can now write the code. It still needs a software engineer to do the rest." I built the comparison to show what format does. It showed me what format doesn't. The hit called where the industry is going. The other explained what the job is. Day 277

Side quest unlocked, let's do this thing. I claimed spot #13 of 40 in Yard #6 on @HackyardSocial 🛜 One week. One theme. One build. 27 spots left. hackyard.tech/yards/yard-6?s…

I asked an AI which accounts I should study to write better. Same nine names everyone gets. All between 170K and 965K followers. So I asked my own feed instead. Six months of it. 378 posts that did far better than the account that posted them usually does. 212 of those came from accounts under 25K followers. The small ones are the ones to learn from. Once I only counted accounts I had seen enough of, the rate at 1K was as good as the rate at 1M. Sometimes better. The big accounts are not better at beating their own numbers. They just have more people watching. That part I can't copy. More on this soon. Day 276

Somewhere in the afternoon I closed an issue and opened the list. Exactly as long as it was when I started. Ten closed. Ten opened. Net zero. The ten that left were real problems. The ten that arrived are on a list instead of in my head. A lot of building feels this way. You can't see the trade from the number.

You can cook at home. Restaurants are still here. Not because cooking is hard. Because you don't want to do it every night, and you really don't want to run a kitchen. Making an app went the same way. The building stopped being the hard part a while ago. The making is the first half. Keeping it running at 2am is the other half, and it's still work someone has to want to do. Day 275

The last thing I do every day is a note to myself about what actually happened. What worked, what didn't, what I decided, and what it felt like. A few lines, written for nobody. I started doing it months into the build. I wish I'd started on day one. Everything before that is a blur with a post attached to it. Write things down.

A channel recommendation is only as good as the product it was tested on. Pinterest gets sold to founders as an indexing shortcut. 640 million users, almost every search unbranded, pins that keep working for months. All of it true. Also true: nothing from Pinterest showed up in the top ten for the eleven searches that matter to me. Different product, different answer. I checked before I automated it. Cheaper that way. Day 274

A friend posted his name and where he's from. No product, no pitch, nothing clever. Around a hundred new followers in a day. I've spent 273 days on the build side of that. So I'm spending a few on the other side.

A router that sat in a drawer for years is now the newest thing on my network. It was running firmware from 2022. That build reached end of life and stopped getting patches, so every month it stayed in that drawer it got a little less safe to plug in. Took a Raspberry Pi on a bench, four tries at a login I couldn't remember, and a ten minute wait I wasn't allowed to interrupt. It came back up. One down, the rest of the network is next. Day 273

Nevo had the week none of us want. Everything hit at once, and he was up all night with it. He didn't hide any of it. Posted the bad news himself, as he learned it, before he had the full picture. The replies came back as support. I want to be that open when it's my turn.

Security is front and center this week. I like seeing it there. In the builder space it sits off to the side most of the time. When it works, you never hear about it. So the only posts it gets are when something breaks. This week something did. A platform got compromised, keys leaked, and a founder had to take his whole product down and tell everyone while it was still happening. That could be any of us. I'd rather this topic be loud before it's personal. Day 272

The writers selling by email are the best I read. Everything they claim comes with something behind it. In software the evidence takes longer. You can ship a good tool and still wait months for the proof it was worth it. I take the lesson anyway. Say the offer plainly, then go earn it.