Day 100 — Evaluation and What’s Next
That went by pretty quickly.
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift, that's why it's called the present. — Master Oogway.
Silly quote aside, I believe in the importance of reflecting on the past (mine or other people’s) objectively if we want to improve. 100 days passed since I first started this blog so I’d like to do a mental exercise with myself and you.
On Day 1, I wrote down: “The first 100 days will be focused on transitioning out of a fixed scarcity mindset into a gritty abundance mindset”. I now believe many skills, including this “gritty abundance mindset”, live on continuums rather than binary yes or no states.
I thought I could figuratively take my brain out, wash it up and put some David Goggins sauce on it, and shove it back in.
At this point, I feel the original goal was kind of bullshit because a fundamental shift like that manifests itself in many ways and occasions. I realize I have a better abundance mindset when it comes to physical training and running, versus digging into the tenth hour of trying to sync some data in my app. I also had days where I woke up and felt like a champ, unwaveringly knocking down all obstacles the day presented, but also had days where I wanted to stay in bed till 3pm because I didn’t want to work on it anymore.
Hopefully things will work itself out more. For now I want to recap 100 days of progress across work and personal.
Work
I’m about 2 months of dedicated work into Boum. It is partially inspired by WHOOP and Nike Run Club, and the problem I’m hoping to solve for runners is that they aren’t able to improve their performance in the midst of workout. The thinking is that the ones truly obsessed about improving would like to know and correct what went wrong the moment it does.
The product is not close to launch, but I have a handful of test users. They have not had the aha moment, and frankly neither have I. This naturally brings me to thinking about whether or not I should keep going down the rabbit hole, which is where I sit at 100 days.
For the moment, I’ve decided to keep going for the following reasons
I want to see this through
I don’t want to be a little bitch
I objectively know there are at least 1-2 more months of progress that can elevate the prototype from where it is today. If I put in that work, it’ll at the minimum be 2-3 times as good (does it have demand? that’s a different question)
I have not shown this to enough people to rule out it does not work yet.
So, I’ll re-evaluate after I had 100 users test the app. And I want to select these 100 users more intentionally versus yanking in a random friend who runs occasionally, and only onboard those who I hypothesize are ideal customers. I anticipate this taking me into September, but I’ll try to shorten that time horizon the best I could.
Awkward crossroads situation aside, I am learning a massive amount:
By selecting a consumer digital app idea, I have now experienced firsthand the level of granularity that B2C buyers expect. It sucks the soul and time out of my day sometimes, because my users complain about the UX fidelities that I haven’t had time to get to. Though as a result, I’m learning more about building good enough user experiences — While these are covered frequently in startup advice, it’s easy to forget when 50 things need to all improve just to validate a concept.
I’m getting more comfortable learning new things. The first month felt fairly daunting, but now I have started to discover pockets of the Internet where awesome people teach about tech or business and I benefit from them massively.
While tough, building in a consumer space I enjoy is hugely beneficial to the learning curve because of the amount of reps I can get quickly. There were days where I go to an event and loop in five test users, and through each conversation I learn to ask better questions.
I’m almost twice as good of a software engineer in just two months because I now write, change, or delete 10-20 times the amount of code than I used to. While this experience is siloed in technical aspects, I think it applies to everything I’ve excelled at in the past: competitions, SATs, interviewing, powerlifting, sports. If I show up consistently over time, I will get better. There are things that can help speed up the process, but even if I had nothing besides the Internet, I’ll still get there — it might just take way longer than I initially imagined.
I’m learning the existence and difference of taking on executional versus idea risks in building a business. Currently, I’m incurring both with something that has never existed and may not have demand, as well as not having a clue on how to get from 0 to 1 and beyond. Given that I know I can work my butt off way more than the average person, it might make more sense to reduce my idea risk by taking on a problem with an existing demand that large incumbent businesses are already solving, and tackling the problem with higher precision. Honestly, don’t want to think too much about this right now, though I’d like to revisit this after I hit my 100 test user goal.
Now onto criticisms. I will attempt to phrase these less as a lack of character deficiency but rather a skill deficiency, because most of what I’ve done wrong are simply skills I do not yet have, which don’t reflect back on myself as a person (as long as I actively improve on it).
I didn’t do a thorough enough job in identifying the problem, and I’ve now semi-dug myself into a little hole, and hence the crossroad of continuing vs pivoting. I now pay the debt of building something where the need of it may be nonexistent, and in the upcoming iterations and potential pivot it’ll be very critical to prioritize doing that through getting down a crisp understanding of the actual problem I want to solve.
I’m not operating at my max potential due to a lack of ability to focus. Objectively, a 11-hour work day for me is only effectively for about 6-7 hours. I still get distracted by new ideas that could work in lieu of Boum, and I spend too much time bogged down finding conceptual flaws rather than continuing to just do. In the next 100 days, I can improve my personal output by clarifying the outcome I want to achieve and forget about everything else. Ideally, my daily output should be minimally affected by the motivation of that day — Get the things done that need to be done despite how I feel.
I do not yet know how to sell or market effectively. Granted, this is me making a deliberate choice to prioritize a functional enough app to get more signal. I see opinions from more successful entrepreneurs from both sides, to focus on building without distraction despite low traction on one end to doing nothing besides pre-product validations to validate need on the other. If any of my audience has experience in this, please dm and I’d love to hear from your direct experiences.
The first 100 days taught me the basics I’ll need in the future in aspects of work, though it has also revealed a few gaps I’ll need to close in order to do them more effectively.
The goals of the next 100 days will be simple: Make Boum into something I find value in (measured by my own willingness to use during my Philly Marathon training), and get 100 users to test it.
Personal
Personal life outside of work has been sparse with sprinkles of attempts at detoxing to say the least. I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily happier after 100 days, and am still trying to find a balance between working my ass off and having a life.
Some reflections:
As a direct result of needing to focus, I’ve stopped drinking and had much less social outings. Oddly, I didn’t really miss it. If anything, the only lingering feeling I still have is the idea that I’m “supposed” to do those things. I’m starting to step out of that slowly as I find joy in building relationships with people who have a clearer goal of what they want and not only going out as part of a self-imposed expectation.
I still struggle with unplugging. While I do think there is value and admiration for those who work from the moment they wake till the moment they sleep, I’m not there right now and sometimes I need to truly relax to be more productive the next day and also be present when I’m spending time with Jenny or with friends. I’d like to better time-block my work vs life times since I prefer for this to be a multi-decade journey instead of a two-year hooligan startup founder phase.
My friends are changing as a result of the work I’ve been doing. As result of maximizing time to grow, I’ve started to hang out more with other founders and less with 9-5 friends who have more time to do fun things. Though I think I’m in a weird spot because I’m growing to have less in common with friends I had previously, but not enough with people who I think are doing ambitious things and winning at them.
The life I want to have is still unclear. On one hand, spending my life working with athletes is pretty damn cool, but that does mean life and work inevitably become one. And on the other, running a profitable SAAS product as a solo founder and having the financial freedom and time to vegetate in Bali seems pretty fun too. The third and more recent thought is becoming an actual athlete myself — subjectively, my thoughts are that it’s pretty unlikely, since I should’ve probably started that twenty years ago. Though the lingering thought I’ve always had is the what if; what if I can actually do it, maybe maximal joy for me is just being an ace at the sport and build a life around it, rather than making something that helps others do the sport better.
Clearly, more thoughts about work and less on personal things. At the moment I think that’s okay because I’m in the phase of pushing out a product instead of maximizing fun.
See you in two weeks, and hit that like button if you enjoyed it. If you have thoughts or ideas on some of the things I covered, I’d love to hear it!
Thanks for reading,
JZ, July 25, 2024