I ran into a friend in Brooklyn Heights recently, who admonished me for failing on my promise to write regularly. I looked back at my last post and realized two months had passed. I fell victim to the exact trap I wanted to avoid.
When I first started my Substack, I wrote.
I’m not sure it’s possible to be entirely novel on the internet, but I still want to push myself to publish more: I’ll generally shoot for “good enough to be useful/interesting” over perfectionism and refine my thoughts based on feedback from the three of you that end up reading my posts.
Instead, it’s been two months since my last post. I secretly wanted perfect - a polished, thoughtful post - and waited for that opportunity to present itself. Rather than the obvious to emerge from thin air, the cycle only worsened: with each passing week, the bar for my next blog post felt higher (likely to nobody but myself, I should add).
Schools generally teach us that mastery is best achieved alone, through long nights in the library. When we show up for the test, we had better be ready. Some companies mirror this mentality: they prize polished presentations and passive meetings. But starting a company is categorically different. Few companies ever approach perfection. At Gorillas, we hit nine-figure ARR within a year of operating. Behind every delivery was chaos and freneticism: We were far from perfect, and yet we still served customers.
Perfectionism has its merits: painstaking detail orientation can take something from forgettable to extraordinary, and only really special projects last. But the road to perfect is dotted with failed attempts and incomplete work. Part of my purpose of starting Treadmill was to feel more comfortable with these in-between states. The last couple of months has been a period of transition for me: moving to New York, signing my first apartment lease since COVID, working on Natascha’s green card.
Most of all, I expected to be fully committed to one startup idea by now, after 4-5 months of full-time ideating. It’s not for lack of effort; if anything, I might need to step back for a minute to reprioritize and refocus. Nor is it for lack of interim progress: I’ve amassed a roster of landing pages, demos, and customer interviews until now. Rather, it’s the simultaneous act of maintaining a high bar for inspiration while recognizing that perfection can come at the expense of good enough.
Maybe the falsehood is in thinking that there’s ever really true output. Even yardsticks that we think of as endpoints - product launches, quarterly reports, a line of code - are really just interim measures on our way to something else. We never really arrive at a final destination; there’s alway somewhere else to go.
The parallel between startup ideation and the initial intentions of this blog only really came to me as I was writing this post. The process of writing - fast enough to say something useful, but slow enough to surface connections that would have otherwise gone overlooked - is partly the point. Perfect can come later.
That’s all for now. I’ll see you back here soon.