The Present Minds / Our Story
The story
The story
of building
something real.
Two founders. No team. A failed first attempt. And a rebuild that became something worth lasting.
Two Founders
2022 to Now
Still Building
Two people. Another country. The specific kind of longing that comes from knowing exactly what you want to build and having almost no room to build it.
The years beforeBefore it had a name, it was just two people living abroad, carrying ambitions that the weather, the economy, and the weight of ordinary life kept pressing flat. Then the decision got made. Not a confident one. Just the decision to start with the moment that was there.
Chapter I
Before it had a name
Before it
had a name.
Both founders have academic backgrounds rooted in understanding how people think, communicate, and absorb the world. That kind of education is both a gift and a slow frustration. You see clearly what is missing. You see it in every badly built digital publication, every article that treats its reader as someone to be processed rather than respected. You see it everywhere. And for a long time, the gap between seeing it and doing something about it is simply the daily fact of your life.
The weather in another country does not help. The economy does not help. The pressure of making a foreign life work while nursing a creative ambition that feels increasingly out of reach does not help. But the idea did not go away. Ideas with real weight rarely do.
The ambition was never the problem. Time, geography, money, and circumstance were doing their usual work on the idea. The question was only whether it would survive all of them.
On the years before
Chapter II
The first attempt
2022Omega News.
Two hundred articles.
Two years of work.
The first version was called Omega News. The domain was bought. The site was built. The socials went live. Writers were writing. Articles were going up every week. To outside eyes it looked like a publication finding its feet. From the inside it was something far more demanding than it appeared.
200+
Articles Written
2
Years of Work
0
Shortcuts Taken
Instagram Page
2022
The WorkOver two years, more than two hundred articles were written and published the proper way. The work was real. The effort was real. The results, however, were pointing somewhere difficult. Omega News could never quite reach the architecture it needed to be built for scale. The foundation was not holding what was being placed on it.
April 2024
The decision
In April 2024, Omega News was shut down. Permanently. Not paused. Not rebranded. Killed. Everything poured into it over two years was closed and walked away from. That is a harder thing to do than starting something new.
Killing something you built with real effort is one of the quieter kinds of courage. Nobody sees it. It does not make a sound. It just sits with you for a while.
April 2024* * *
Chapter III
The rebuild
2025No freelancers.
No shortcuts.
Just the two of them.
The Present Minds did not begin the way most digital publications do. No freelance developers brought in to build the site. No marketing strategists hired to shape the brand. The founders decided, early and deliberately, that if they were going to build something worth having, they needed to understand every part of it themselves.
Categories were rethought from first principles. The editorial direction was mapped carefully. Authors were reached out to individually. And then the two founders split the work the way you split a genuinely difficult problem: one took the visual architecture, the other took the code. Everything that would normally require a team was done between two people and everything else life was demanding of them at the same time.
Shaniya Naz
Co-Founder
Visual Architecture
Navneet Shukla
Founder
Editorial & Code
Shaniya Naz
The Visual Architecture
Every colour, layout, and detail the reader sees and feels without knowing it. The identity that holds across every surface of the publication.
Navneet Shukla
The Code Underneath
The logic beneath all of it. The systems that make a site behave like it knows what it is doing, built without a team and without a template.
The Present Minds was formally established in late 2025. By then the site, the tools, the reading experience, and the editorial systems were all in place. Not because they had to be rushed. Because neither founder was willing to put their name on something they had not fully built themselves.
Chapter IV
Before the traffic. Before the impressions. There were a handful of writers who said yes without asking what was in it for them.
Chapter IV
The writers
The writers who
said yes anyway.
Before traffic, before Google impressions, before any of the numbers that tell you a publication is real, there were a small group of authors who said yes without asking what was in it for them. No payment. No large platform to offer. Only a site that believed in the quality of writing enough to take it seriously, and writers who believed in that enough to contribute.
Their work brought the first real readers. Those readers brought Google's attention. That attention became the traction that made the next step possible. Publications rarely acknowledge this properly. The Present Minds does.
On the early contributors
Chapter V
The mission
Built with
one aim.
Every decision made while building The Present Minds came back to a single intention. Not content volume. Not traffic strategy. Not the algorithm. One thing.
The Present Minds was built
To write articles that earn the time they ask for and leave the reader a little more themselves than when they started.
Both founders are not native English speakers. English is their second language. That fact shaped the publication more than any editorial policy could. They know what it is like to read something important and hit a word you do not recognise and have to leave the piece to find it. They know what it is like to click a link and have no idea where it leads. They built the site they would have wanted to read.
The aim was to give every reader the ultimate luxury of reading at their own pace, in their preferred environment, on any device, in any browser. And to give every associated author the ability to publish at a single click of the mouse. No friction on either end of the process.
Chapter VIWhat we
What we
actually built.
Not a pitch deck. An honest record of every feature made, and the exact reason it exists on the site right now.
01
A reading experience second to noneCinematic full-bleed images and video. Article title, author, date, reading time, and category surfaced before the first line. Three background modes. Built-in read mode for browsers that lack one.
02
Inline glossary pillsAny difficult term expands inline. You never leave the article to understand it. Built by two people who read in their second language and know exactly how that friction feels.
03
Link transparency throughoutEvery outbound link shows its name and full destination before you click. No surprises. No dark patterns anywhere on the site.
04
One-click sharing on 8 platformsIf something is worth reading it should be effortless to pass on. That is the only editorial principle behind this feature.
05
Takeaways and FAQs built in
For the skimmer, the deep reader, and the one who comes back later needing the short version. All three served by the same article.
06
Like, dislike, and comment
A real signal from readers that reaches the editors. The feedback shapes what gets written next.
07
Inner Signals: 16 parameters
A self-analysis tool built in-house across 16 real psychological frameworks. A genuine instrument for self-understanding, not a content hook.
08
Single-click publishing
Every associated author publishes at a single click. The friction between writing and being read has been removed entirely.
Chapter VII
The full arc
Where we
came from.
2022
Omega News begins
Domain bought. Site built. Socials live. Two founders abroad, building something real between the cracks of everything else life was asking of them at the same time.
2022 to 2024
200 articles. Two years of real work.
Not rushed. Not shortcut. Written properly and published with intention over two years. The work was real even when the architecture was not holding.
April 2024
Omega News permanently closed
Not paused. Not rebranded. The hardest kind of decision, made cleanly. Two years of work, closed forever. The site cannot be reached.
2025
The Present Minds founded
New name. New structure. Categories rebuilt from first principles. No outsourcing, no shortcuts. One founder on visuals, one on code.
Late 2025
Formally established
The full reading experience, the tools, the editorial systems, the contributing authors. Everything in place. The present minds, properly standing.
Now
Still building. Not stopping.
Growing, evolving, improving. The foundation is being laid with the intention of outlasting both the people who built it. The work continues.
The longer vision
Deeply inspired by the story of John Russell Scott and what he did to make The Guardian permanently free from the reach of capital.
He built a structure that outlasted him. A trust, not a transaction. The aim at The Present Minds moves in that direction. Not identical, but oriented by the same belief: that good editorial work deserves a home that does not have to compromise itself to stay alive. Sustainable. Worth it. Built to last longer than the people who built it. No matter if the founders stay or not.
The journey has been long. We are still growing, still evolving. There is no fear of the competition, the journey, or the hardships. Can we spin a story or not?
The Present Minds, 2025 to now
You have read the storyNow read the
Now read the
publication.
Everything described on this page is live, working, and waiting for you right now.