Someone from the actual industry emailed us last week. Not a mailing list. Not a bot. A person, at a company that has existed longer than we have, who had somehow noticed we exist and wanted to have a conversation.
I read it four times. Then I sat there with a slightly odd feeling in my chest that took a while to identify as fear.
You'd think the first bit of outside interest would be pure delight, and there was some of that — a genuine yelp in the group chat, a round of "wait, really?" But underneath it was something less fun: the sudden awareness that we were about to be looked at by someone who does this for a living. Up to now we've been marking our own homework. Everything we've decided has been decided by us, judged by us, graded generously by us. This was the first hint of an external examiner.
So we prepared like maniacs, which in hindsight was both sensible and a bit revealing. We wrote notes. We rehearsed answers to questions nobody had asked yet. We had a small argument about how much to say — the box stays shut, but a locked box is a hard thing to have a meeting about. Mostly we worried about sounding like amateurs, which is a funny thing to worry about when you unambiguously are amateurs at this specific part.
The call itself was fine. Better than fine, actually. They were kind, curious, asked a couple of questions we hadn't thought about and one we absolutely should have. Nothing was signed, nothing was promised, and honestly nothing may come of it. But something shifted anyway.
Because here's what I keep chewing on: for a year this has been a private thing that a handful of us believe in. The belief has been entirely self-generated, which is exhausting in a way you don't notice until someone else briefly holds a corner of it. Forty-five minutes of a stranger treating us like a real studio did something to my posture that no amount of internal pep talk has managed.
The lesson, I think, is that we need to get comfortable being looked at. It's coming either way. Better to practise now, while the stakes are low and the worst outcome is a polite email that goes nowhere.
We've written down the question we fumbled. We'll have a better answer next time.
— Thiago, still a bit surprised anyone noticed
Posted by Thiago Moreira · August 18, 2026
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