Hey friends, welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the previous reflections. In case you haven’t read them, check them out: last week’s reflections.

Now, onto my reflections for the past week:

A Quote I Liked

Growth Mindset

Perfection gets in the way of the important things. Take it from the cofounder of Netflix:

The last 10% of a project is what keeps you spiraling into an abyss of not doing the important things.

For me, this can look like making sure every step of my automated onboarding flow for new customers is accounted for or obsessing over the design of a landing page. But these things are rarely what will make or break a project.

This can translate to other things like:

• starting a side hustle (don’t treat it like an already-successful business and waste time fine-tuning operations, start marketing your idea + 3 USPs)

• picking up a new skill (don’t worry about carrying a conversation in Japanese fluently when you haven’t even tried learning the basics consistently)

• pursuing your creative outlet (don’t obsess over getting 1M followers on TikTok or YouTube when you haven’t even posted 100 videos)

Quoting Sahil Bloom: “Good enough is often the optimal solution. Ambitious, high-achieving people are more likely to get caught up in the perfection of that last 10% than accept the good enough outcome and move on to the next important thing. Training yourself to identify when perfection is getting in the way of your goals is a key skill to develop—in business as much as in life.”

Entrepreneurship

Twitter/X have been performing better overall but impressions are stagnant!

I haven’t stuck to the goals I set last week about expanding the channels I’m using. I’m still only posting on Twitter 🤦‍♂️ While it gets decent impressions and engagement, it’s not where my target users are making decisions. Note to self: Just do it already!

On a brighter note, Community Setup Pro is going live soon. I’ve spent the past week working on a new landing page that incorporates all the feedback I got from early waitlisters. It’s not real validation if nobody is paying for it, so this new landing page will finally be collecting pre-orders!

If the product doesn’t get enough traction then I’ll refund all pre-orders and shift my focus to my other projects.

In case you're curious, here is my approach for Community Setup Pro:

1. Super simple landing page (template here) with problem statement + 3 USPs + waitlist sign-up form.

2. Speak to early waitlisters. Find out what they like, what they find lacking, etc.

3. With enough traction, launch v2 landing page (template here by my friend Yifan) with new feedback and payment capture. Everything can be achieved with no-code tools and ChatGPT.

4. As the sales start flowing in, build the product publicly so that there’s a continuous and open feedback loop.

I’m a marketer by trade and have very basic Python & HTML knowledge, so I mainly use no-code tools to get all this done. I can write more about them if you’re interested, let me know!

Freedom

Feeling trapped is part mindset, part environment. When you lack the willpower to push through the mental block, change your physical environment to get rid of that trapped feeling.

It can be super simple. For me, I take a 5-minute walk to the nearby coffee shop and get a coffee (they remember my order so this cheers me up too), or a slightly longer walk to the nearest park where I just watch the ducks, bask in the sun, be surrounded by greenery, and read.

I didn’t have a fantastic first impression of Bucharest (in Romania) but that’s because I was looking for the wrong things. I just came from Budapest (in Hungary) which was a city without the bustle of a major city like Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur, so I naturally looked for that familiarity here. But the beauty of Bucharest, and Romania in general, is more in its nature. There are so many parks here!

It’s worth reflecting on whether the place you’re in excels in what you’re expecting from it.

Homework

Don’t let perfection hold you back. What does “good enough” look like for the project you’re working on? Can you achieve that by next week?

Unless you have a very clear path or are specializing in something, you’d always benefit from breadth over depth. Cover lots of grounds first before deciding to be hyperfocused on one thing.

Ship an imperfect version of your project that’s good enough before over-analyzing problems that it hasn’t even encountered yet.

Till we meet again next week.

Cheers to the future,
Ernest
indiepreneur, digital nomad, transhumanist

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