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So true. I usually waste way too much energy on this type of thing.

And the thing is, the most harmful thing about it is it will never be complete, never be good enough. You'll look at something neat and you'll want to copy it, you'll want to change your layout and at the end of the day that's just a huge waste of time.

I struggle with it and It's a really bad thing.

What's the problem if it isn't made yet?

This is a better strategy, see if theres a big enough market. They're also building the list so that their launch will be good and they don't have to spam it everywhere else, they just alert the people who already expressed interest.

There's nothing wrong with finding demand first, smart startups do this all the time.

Too much work if you want anything modern.

As in don't you want some tags to organize the posts? Don't you want an index of your tags, and an index of your posts? You'd need to edit by hand 10 files just to add a new post if you wanted those necessary features and yeah they are necessary if you're not just writing a diary for yourself. If that's the case you don't need a blog at all just a folder with text files on your machine.

But I agree with you in that I like to just open up a text editor and start writing, so I use a script called "Bash Blog" which lets me do just that.

The website it produces are static html files, and it uses a shell script to reassemble itself after every new post I created so I don't need to end up editing 10 files, but I still get all the useful features I mentioned above.

http://cfenollosa.github.io/bashblog/

This is a good idea for sure.

I have a suggestion to make it even more powerful. Turn the mockups into a blog. This will benefit you in a few ways

1) You'll be able to grow your audience as a designer / consultant

2) It will provide you endless ways to pump out content to the audience you're building, allowing you to position yourself as an expert in your field and rank in search engines for terms related to UX design and design improvement.

3) You can do write ups on the blog which will be valuable to your following as you grow it and you'll start to get a reputation and more people will begin to approach you asking to design for them.

The above is a great long term way to demonstrate your skills and gather a network of peers in your field.

You could simply email the company the page of your website,

"Hello hope you don't mind,

I've taken a look at your website and I've used it as a case study for how I would improve it in order to benefit your conversion rates (whatever you guess their goals might be). I hope you like the publicity, perhaps you'd like to work together to make this happen?"

The above seems like a more credible way to go about this, you're giving them value for free, you're giving free and valuable information to an audience which demonstrates you care about the field and are keeping on the top of your game to your potential prospects. And you've got a handful of other example case studies that these prospects can look at demonstrating your ability to redesign things for businesses. Showing that you are the real deal and you have lots of good ideas. They will want a piece of your pie, most likely.