I am my worse enemy

My updates would be less real if I were picturing myself as the survivor entrepreneur. I could talk about how I overcame all the obstacles life threw me. And how I found success thanks to my resilience.

But that's not true.

Before I explain, let me first first tell you what I'm doing.

I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day. At the bottom of this post, you'll find a progress update with the EXACT actions I took to get here. You can also binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter.

I wish it was like in the movies where the founder has it all figured out.

The reality is that I'm a simple dude with my fair share of problems. On top of that, I sometimes have a self-sabotaging instinct that kicks in and derails my plans.

This is not a post about asking people to sympathise with me. I want to share the problems I have and show people who might have the same that we're not alone.

Here's my two biggest progress-killer:

- procrastination

- human interaction paralysis

Procrastination

I wish it was the classic "instead of working I'll play video games".

My procrastination is FAR worse because it makes me feel productive.

It's probably the worst-case scenario here. If something makes you feel productive, you want to keep doing that and get the feel-good chemicals your brain releases.

Here's an example:

I had to create a feature on my mobile app. I needed a simple list of tasks to do. I could use pen and paper but I'm a tech guy, why don't I use Notion?

Notion is an amazing tool designed to make my life miserable.

A simple to-do list has infinite ways to customize it. You can create rollup values, report progress over time, and more. There are more notion templates than NPM packages these days with thousands more coming out every day.

I need a to-do list, I need the BEST one of course. So look through all the templates out there and then get a working to-do list. But then I start worrying about what I might need in the future and start future-proofing the to-do list.

This went from a problem that could be solved with pen and paper to an entire day wasted on Notion.

I'm sure if you used notion in the past you know what I'm talking about.

Human interaction paralysis

I'm sure there is a scientific name for this but I don't have the time to research it.

Sometimes when I have to interact with somebody I'll do everything I can to avoid doing it. To make things worse, I also worry about what will happen if enough time passes and I don't reply.

Here's a concrete example:

- I get a WhatsApp message from a friend

- I don't want to reply to it

- I don't even open WhatsApp for fear that will see myself online

- I worry about how much time has passed and what I'll say to justify it

This can be an email or a phone call. Any interaction.

The funny part is that every single time, without fail, is all in my head. Most of the interactions are amazing I worry about nothing. Most of the time they assumed I was busy and I'd reply on my own time.

I still have this problem now while giving daily updates on my journey.

I find myself posting on Reddit, opening the app after 5 minutes, and immediately closing it when I see the notification icon.

I don't know what I'm afraid of. 90% of the comments I get on Reddit are supportive and the remaining 10% is for the people that I can't please. Or are comments from people that don't see the value in what I'm doing. Nothing to worry about.

Is a mental block that is very hard to deal with.

So far I haven't found a way to fix this particular problem, but there is tons of stuff helping:

Exercise

I work out 6 days a week, 3 days in the gym and 3 days running. Working out hasn't eliminated the problem but helped immensely. I have noticed that on the days I don't work out, self-sabotaging actions are more prevalent

Talking about it

I had a friend who had the exact same problem interaction problem I have. Seeing a text coming in and worrying about that unread message for days.

Somehow this came up in a conversation. Up to that point, I thought it was just my problem. Talking about it made it so much easier to see that I wasn't alone in this and we're now joking about it. It made everything so much better

Posting daily update

Committing to posting daily updates enables me to be better. I know that I have to make some meaningful progress if I want to talk about it. This gives me a reason to do the right thing.

I still get sidetracked. I spent an hour dealing with dark mode on Tailwind and Next JS. But as I was doing that I saw the time passing and not dark mode wasn't working. I dropped it and moved to something more meaningful.

As I was adding the ability to have different templates for pages, I found out why dark mode wasn't working and fixed it.

I think these problems will never go away, but I can deal with them better now.

Over to you now:

Have you experienced something similar? do you have these self-sabotaging moments?

Let me know in the comments, I promise you'll feel better talking about it. I feel so much better after writing this.

Progress update

- I'm currently validating a hypothesis. "People are willing to pay for a product that makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages."

- I have recruited 10 people to do a user interview, and I've interviewed 8 people so far.

- I'm shipping part of the MVP daily. Yesterday I made it so that people could create new pages and be hosted on my platform. Today I'm adding a simple analytics tool to see how many people saw a page and the overall CTR of the page.

Celebrations

You are all incredible!

- I have 21 subscribers to the newsletter

- My LinkedIn newsletter has 123 subscribers at the time of writing

I cannot thank you all enough for your help and support, you're legends!