The first six months of 42 Things To Do
The story of the first six months for us, what we've achieved so far, and where we go next.
Six months is a long time. It’s long enough for TV shows to become the most talked about thing in years before being quickly forgotten even faster. It’s long enough for governments to rise and fall. It’s also long enough for a business to come to life. Six months ago, 42 Things To Do wasn’t really a thing. It was summer 2025, and I had an idea and an ambition, and some extra time on my hands that I’d never had before. So I started coding, building, writing and thinking. At first it was fun and easy, but the more complicated things got the harder they got. Whenever I had an idea I brought it to life, and had nobody else to answer to. It stayed fun, though over time it stopped being easy. It didn’t take long to realise that this isn’t how a business really gets built. Soon I was joined in this endeavour by some of the most amazing people I know. I was humbled and proud when they agreed to come onboard, and I’m so excited to work with them to bring 42 Things to life. If you were able to look back on where 42 Things was six months ago you’d see a similar but very different platform in front of you. You’d still have seen a huge list of activities to choose from to inspire you with ideas, but almost all of them would have had the same picture and no description or detail at all. You’d have no way of knowing how easy or hard they might be, and no way of searching things out. There was no quiz function, no blogs, no community, and no coaching. Hell, even the contact forms didn’t actually work. It was the start of an idea, but that was it. Ideas are one thing, but they don’t change the lives of anyone other than the person who has them. So we got to work. Over the past six months we’ve added: - Quizzes to help you understand what you're like and then discover activity ideas - Blogs for you to read about activities and also to share their own thoughts, ideas and experiences - AI-powered coaching , now directly embedded in activities so it all appears as soon as you add something to your list - To-do lists to help you make real progress - A full community feed , so you will be able to talk about your achievements and offer help and support to others - Integrations with things like Google and Twitter to make signing in even easier - DMs so you’ll be able to communicate with each other in private - Plus a thousand tweaks and improvements We’ve also been working to write the content for the nearly 2000 activity ideas we’ve already uploaded, which is no mean feat! We’re looking forward to rewriting this over time with advice and ideas from our growing community, not to mention using photos submitted by our users too. All in good time, of course. In the background, we’ve also been doing the less visible work: registering the business, sorting banking and ICO compliance, and putting a Board in place. We’ve officially brought shareholders on board, and the Board of Directors has started meeting so we can plan where we’re going to be in ten years before working out what we need to do over the next ten weeks to get us a bit closer to that. I’m not going to lie - it’s been hard. Building a platform from scratch when you’ve never really written a line of code in your life is one hell of a way to start your coding journey. Working out a design and flow when you’ve got neither users nor user researchers is nearly impossible. Building all the infrastructure for the platform and for the business when you’ve never done either before is more than a little challenging. And to pretty much be doing it all on your own for the first four months is sub-optimal. There have been plenty of times when I’ve questioned my sanity. When I’ve been up writing content at 2.30am, or waking up at 4.30am with an idea for how to rebuild something that was working so that it actually becomes beautiful and useful. And times when I’ve been trying to fix a bug in one place only to create ten more bugs elsewhere, some of which I don’t discover for months. But through all of those tough times I’ve relied on one thing: that 42 Things is a good idea . That it’ll help people come up with ideas that’ll make their lives better in some way. That it’ll help them go from idea to plan. And then that it’ll help them go from plan to ticking things off their lists that they never might have done had 42 Things not existed. We’re six months into our journey, and have come a long way in that time. But we have a long, long way to go. We’re just about ready to launch (more on that in the coming months) and have built a stable platform that people are giving us good feedback about. But without users we’re nothing more than a good-looking website that people can take a look around. 2026 will be all about getting real people signed up and really using the platform. We want to hear from all of you: what do you like about 42 Things? What really annoys you? What works, and what doesn’t? What would you like to be able to do, but you can’t do yet? Every single bit of feedback is gold dust to us. I’ll be reading each and every comment, all of the feedback (positive and negative) and using it to help make 42 Things a better experience for you all. Because that’s what we want from it. I’m already looking forward to the day I hear the first person say “I did this thing and I’d never have done it if it weren’t for 42 Things”. If we help even one person do something they wouldn’t otherwise have done, it will have been worth it. If we help a lot of you live your lives more fully, of course, that would be even better. Am I happy with the progress we’ve made over the first six months? Absolutely. Am I satisfied, though? No, not by a long shot. There’s so much more to be done, and I’m already excited about starting 2026 off with a bang. I hope you are too. Glen