--- title: "The Hardest Page I Ever Built Was One Paragraph About Myself" url: https://stacklist.com/card/1f6a7424-1370-4764-b63d-211840f96fc3 source_url: "https://martinazrnec.substack.com/p/the-hardest-page-i-ever-built-was" stack: https://stacklist.com/stack/9cfc881a-0327-4985-a4be-841a05a02d3f summary: "Surfaces is a new product designed to solve the problem of outdated personal websites by offering pre-built page templates that require minimal maintenance and decision-making. The platform uses a block-based system with AI integration, backend constraints, and SEO optimization to help users create and maintain simple, authentic online presences." tags: "web-design, personal-website, product-launch, user-experience, blank-page-problem, ai-integration, surfaces" key_entities: "Martina Zrnec (person), Surfaces (technology), Stacky (technology), blank-page-problem (concept), AI-agent (concept), MCP (technology)" classification: "analysis" content_hash: "sha256:aaeac371081416f4231dc3233dfe677760988fec8e8910c3e21a2f16e9f6016c" acp_version: "0.2" token_counts_approximate: 1324 visibility: public agent_accessible: true status: "final" --- # The Hardest Page I Ever Built Was One Paragraph About Myself The Hardest Page I Ever Built Was One Paragraph About Myself We built Surfaces so nobody has to keep rebuilding a website they already stopped loving. Martina Zrnec Sep 10, 2026 1 Share Can I tell you the least impressive thing about my job? I have migrated a production database while it was holding up iOS, Android, four browser extensions, webhooks, and a backend full of functions. It took exactly 2 months and 12 days. It nearly ate me. I survived it, but unsure if I’d do it again. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribe Ask me to write one paragraph about myself, though, and suddenly there is…silence…I could stare at it for 2 months and 12 days and not move a word. You know the page I mean. Maybe you have one. A personal site you made in a burst of energy at eleven at night, with a photo you liked at the time and a headline about who you were two roles ago. The domain still renews. You still pay for it. You have not opened it since. Or maybe you never made it at all. Maybe there is a folder of “this is what I’ll build”. Either way, same problem: the internet has a version of you, and it is out of date, and updating it feels like homework. So we built Surfaces. What we were actually trying to fix The real problem is that a website asks you for everything up front and then punishes you forever for not maintaining it. Nine pages, a blog you will post in twice, a footer nobody reads. We wanted the opposite. Something small enough that keeping it true is not a project. A Surface is a page made of blocks. A hero, a bit about you, a row of the things you have collected, the questions people actually ask you. You pick, you fill, you are done. We shipped three of them: Event, Podcast, and Starter. Event already knows what it needs. There is a date, there is a place, someone will ask whether it is in person. Podcast already knows too. There is a show, there are episodes, they should update themselves so you never touch them again. Starter knows nothing about you. Mine is a Starter. Surprised? The blank page problem, but with better lighting Event and Podcast come with an opinion about what matters. They carry you. Starter hands you a hero, one paragraph, a row of your cards, two placeholder questions, and then it just waits for you politely. There is no structure to hide behind. It is only you, deciding what is true about yourself this year. I stared at that hero for longer than I built and QA-ed it. I have shipped harder things in an afternoon. The part where the machines come in Underneath, there is a backend, a frontend, and an MCP, and they are all reading the same list of what a block is allowed to be. Which means you can hand this to an AI agent and ask it to build your page, and it will, but it cannot make anything up. No invented section, no clever workaround that exists on your page and nowhere else. If it tries, the page simply will not publish. I have lived through enough projects where the frontend believed one thing and the backend believed another. You always find out in production. Always. So this time nobody gets to freelance. Not the agent, not the frontend, not me at two in the morning with an idea. And if an agent does write something for you that no human has confirmed yet, the page keeps a small amber flag on it. It renders. It also quietly keeps saying: a machine wrote this, and you have not looked at it yet. That flag matters to me more than any feature on the list. The part you do not have to think about You do not have to think about SEO. Or AEO. Or whatever the acronym turns out to be next year, when everyone has quietly agreed to pretend they always knew what it meant. You build it with Stacky, and we take care of that part. I know how that sounds coming from the person who built it. But I have watched too many good people spend a whole weekend on a page nobody could find, and then decide the problem was them. It was never them. It was the homework. And it already knows you Earlier I said Starter knows nothing about you. That is true of the template. It is not true of Stacklist. Because if you have been saving things, Stacklist already holds a lot of you. The stacks you made. The cards inside them. The things you chose to feature, your bio, the places you already point people to. So when you ask Stacky to build you a Surface, it is not starting from a blank page. It is starting from everything you already collected, on purpose, over years, usually without thinking of it as material. It pulls your cards into the row. It drafts the paragraph. It guesses the questions people ask you, and it is annoyingly often right. Then, because of that amber flag, it hands the whole thing back and waits for you to say yes. That is the actual trick. Not “AI writes your page.” More like: the page is already mostly there, in the things you saved, and someone finally went and got it. I stared at that hero for a long time. Then we made it so you would not have to. Try it out Turns out the paragraph was never missing. It was sitting in the things I already saved, waiting for someone to read it back to me. Yours is mostly written too. Go say yes to it. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribe 1 Share