How To Balance Deadlines With New Adventures

📲 The Cold Open

Lessons from the week.

This week has been a total frenzy. I’ve had to meet a deadline to ship my AI texting tool to a paying client, while simultaneously packing for my study abroad trip in Spain! Getting through my first timed product sprint has been a humbling, but incredible, experience. Here’s what I learned.

Don’t Let The Big Picture Distract You.

• Only Build What’s Necessary: My first step this week was coming up with a huge list of features for the AI text tool. My second step was throwing as many of them into the trash as I could. Take a look at your own projects, and ask “Is this next feature absolutely necessary for my product to serve its purpose?”. Chances are, your first version can be a lot simpler than you think.

• You Can’t Polish A Piece of Crap: Take the time to write down why your product exists and what issue it is solving. Your products mission has to be rock solid in order to start polishing it. A great UI and user experience don’t matter at all if no one needs your app in the first place.

Timelines Matter.

• Use Deadlines To Help You: With my trip (and the resulting decrease in free time) looming, the pressure to finish this was very real. When time is finite, you’re forced to cut all the fluff, and get features done. Now, I have a solid V1 ready to go, that can continue to be iterated on while in Spain.

• Real Feedback Is Key: Self reflection and growth can only go so far. If you really want your product to succeed, you have to get constructive criticism from real customers. By embracing deadlines to get your product out there, you can kickstart your growth and start iterating on your own processes, and your product.

🗞️ Maintaining The Momentum Abroad

Channeling everything I learn in Spain, back into myself and my work.

Electing to go abroad these next six weeks was a difficult decision. I’ve never left the U.S. or flown alone, and my Spanish from high school is rusty to say the least. Spending time at home seemed like a much more comfortable and familiar alternative.

But I didn’t accomplish anything this year by choosing the comfortable option. The best experiences in life, I’ve learned, require you to take a leap of faith. This one was just a little larger than the others.

When you’re reading this, I’ll be halfway across the Atlantic ocean on a flight to Madrid. I want to take full advantage of this opportunity, and enjoy it as much as I can. But, just because I’ll be spending less time coding, doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not still making progress towards my goals.

Growth and progress as a founder isn’t always directly correlated to how many clients you have or how much money you’re making. Being a good business owner, and even a good person, requires a holistic approach. Studying and exploring Europe might detract from my short term profit, but will make me a more well rounded individual for the future.

So, I’ll keep working on my projects while abroad (and you can still expect Launch Letter every Sunday!), but I recognize that growth and progress comes in different forms.

I challenge you to do the same, and hope you’ll do something this summer that pushes you outside of that comfort zone.

✅ Goal Progress

Just got paid for the first version of the AI text tool! Its for a home cleaning company to streamline their client outreach through texts. Super psyched about V1, and this is just the start of my work for this client. You can check this project out in more depth on my twitter (or shoot me a DM / email!).

On the Launch Letter side of things, I haven’t seen much growth. I think my trip to Spain is a great opportunity to focus on producing more content and exploring other advertising opportunities. Looking forward to it!

🚗 Fast Four

Four quick bullet points to think about!

• 🧰 Tool: X, maybe it’s disingenuous to refer to X / Twitter as a “tool”, but it was extremely valuable for me when building the AI tool. Asking questions in communities like “Build In Public” always nets responses from people eager to help.

• 🧠 Mindset: Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Get your product out there, and get feedback as soon as you can.

• 🔥 Build Idea: A web scraper / AI tool that handpicks the best content to consume for aspiring founders from X, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.

• 📈 A Mistake From The Last Week: I discarded an idea of how to implement context in the AI tool (RAG), as too difficult to implement. After messing around for an hour and getting no results, I realized that I should have just done the complicated but effective solution in the first place.

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