Total Ventures operates differently than a traditional venture firm or a standard software house. We are a building in public studio. This means our work is not hidden behind non-disclosure agreements or multi-year stealth phases. We ship in the open, share our metrics, and document the technical decisions that shape our portfolio of media and software products.
Operating as a building in public studio requires a specific type of discipline. When your progress is visible to other founders and operators, there is no room for filler. You either ship or you don't. This week, we have several updates across the portfolio that highlight our focus on utility and performance.
This Week in the Portfolio
Our team focuses on high-leverage updates that improve the core experience of our products. We do not ship for the sake of activity; we ship to move the needle on specific product goals.
Product Update: Media Property Search
We shipped an update to the search functionality for our primary media portfolio company. Previously, the search results were prioritized by date alone. While this served a chronological purpose, it did not help users find the most relevant evergreen content. We have updated the logic to prioritize relevance based on keyword density and category matching. The result is a more intuitive discovery process for our readers. This was a necessary step as the content library has grown to a size where manual navigation is no longer efficient.
Product Update: Software Tool Billing Logic
For one of our software products, we updated the internal billing logic to handle edge cases in subscription transitions. We noticed that users moving between tiers occasionally experienced a delay in feature access. We refactored the entitlement check to be instantaneous upon the confirmation of the payment event. This removes friction for our most active users and reduces the support burden on our small team.
Lessons Shared: Moving to Unified Aggregates
One of the advantages of running a building in public studio is the ability to apply a single lesson across multiple products simultaneously. When we find a better way to handle data or infrastructure, we don't just apply it to one project; we move the entire portfolio forward.
This week, all 5 projects moved to Firestore aggregates. Previously, we were calculating certain metrics—like total user counts or aggregate engagement scores—by querying the entire collection or maintaining manual counters that were prone to falling out of sync. By moving to built-in aggregation queries, we have simplified our codebase and improved the reliability of our dashboards.
This shift highlights a core philosophy at Total Ventures: prefer built-in platform features over custom-built workarounds. Custom code is a liability. If the managed data layer provides a way to handle a task natively, we take it. This allows our small team to maintain a larger portfolio without increasing the maintenance overhead.