What is a ship log?
A short, public weekly post saying what you shipped, what you learned and what's next. In our cohorts, missing two in a row ends your place.
A ship log is a weekly post, made in public, answering three questions: what did you ship, what did you learn, and what ships next week. It takes ten minutes to write. That's on purpose.
Why public, and why weekly
Private goals are easy to quietly move. A public log turns "I'll get to it" into a record anyone can read, including you, three weeks later. Weekly is short enough that a missed week stands out, and long enough to ship something real.
How we use it in Ship It
In our indie cohort, the ship log replaces reminders and check-in calls. Ship It is online and async, so the log is also how everyone sees what everyone else shipped. The rules are simple:
- One log per week, posted by Sunday at 20:00 Helsinki time.
- Two missed logs and you move back to the free tier. Ship again and you're back.
- "Shipped nothing" is a valid log if you say why. Silence isn't.
We don't chase anyone. The log is the accountability, so we never have to be.
What a good log looks like
Shipped: bulk import from a pasted list, live on production. Learned: 23% of barcode scans fail. Need a manual ISBN fallback. Next: the fallback, then the first Layer 1 article.
Specific beats impressive. "Worked on onboarding" says nothing; "cut signup from four screens to two" says everything.
Ship logs and the Indie League
Logs are also how the Indie League keeps score. Every claim links to proof: a URL, a release, a screenshot. Verified claims earn points and badges, so the leaderboard rewards shipping, not talking about shipping. Logs pair well with validation gates: the log shows progress, the gate decides what's next. Teams can use the same habit internally, written against the team's function map.