What to do when is one of those days?

Building a company is the best thing ever! It is fun, challenging, and rewarding.

And some days is the worst thing that ever happened to you.

Many articles explain that it will always be hard. You need to develop resilience and grit. But I find those articles always lack details.

What does a shit day look like?

What is the best thing to do on a shit day?

What are the worst things to do?

Let me answer all this by telling you about my shit day.

But before I tell you about this, let me give you some context:

- I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day today is day 24.

- I'm adding lessons from my mistakes and learning from current events.

- I'm live-sharing as I build holding nothing back.

- If you're interested, you can binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter.

Over the past few days everything was going great:

• I made amazing progress on my MVP

• I've been building for less than 2 weeks and I'm almost ready to onboard customers

• My newsletter is growing like crazy

• Tons of people followed me on X

Everything was incredible! Until it wasn't.

Yesterday was one of those days.

In the last 24 hours:

- 3 potential customers canceled a sales call

- 2 user interviews I had scheduled were a no-show. For one I just had a not-take AI joining.

- I wasted tons of time battling with a stupid auth issue (skill issue, I'll tell you in a moment)

- For some reason, my post from yesterday attracted all sorts of negative comments. Some people even called me a scammer. I still don't know what I'm trying to scam them out of!

The best thing that happened was a potential customer telling me my product wasn't good enough for his use case.

That is normally good news but it sent me down another rabbit hole to figure out how to accommodate their use case.

I don't want this to become a whining session. I want to talk about what to do when this kind of day happens.

I can already hear people on the back yelling "Grow a pair" or "Did you think it would've been all sunshine and rainbows?"

We all know that it will never be all sunshine and rainbows. But we're still people and just "growing a pair" or pretending bad days don't affect us is not the right way to approach it.

Good days have an amazing positive impact on our lives.

But we're more likely to remember and concentrate on bad days.

So what to do when we have a shit day?

For me, there are 3 easy steps to make a bad day, less bad:

1 - Talk about it

When stuff is in our heads, it's bigger and scarier than it is. Talk about what's bugging you with a friend or a significant other. Once things are out in the open they become so much easier to deal with.

I for example tend to overthink things when I'm having a bad day.

I start doubting my decisions.

After I talk with somebody about my bad day, it's just so much easier to deal with it.

2- Take a minute

I found some correlation between bad days and energy. I tend to have bad days when I've "been at it" for a long time without taking time off.

I'm very lucky that exercise helps me a lot on this front. I work 6 days a week and that helps me manage stress very well.

I've been building my new SaaS in public, posting every day, interviewing people, and building a product on top of everything else that is going on in my life

I think I'm overdue a few days off. I'll take a couple of days off next week to recharge.

If you have a bad day, is a good idea to take a little time off, recover, and come back stronger.

3- Document it

This is probably the hardest as it won't give you immediate value. Works well if you're journaling or keeping a mood log. When you have a really bad day, write down why, and what happened. When you feel better, write down how bad it was and how you feel afterward.

The next time you have a terrible day go back and re-read how you felt and what happened when you felt better.

this will help immensely!

I promise I'll tell you about my skill issue.

I was implementing an auth system with a magic link.

I set up a callback page to get a verification code, exchange it for a valid session token, and store that in a cookie.

On the same page, if everything was fine and no errors happened, I would redirect the user to a dashboard.

I spent a few hours trying to figure out why this wasn't working. All the pieces were working individually:

- I could get the code.

- I could get the session.

- I could create the cookie.

- I could redirect

but all together they weren't working.

Turns out I was setting the cookie on the apex domain and redirecting to a subdomain expecting the cookie to be there. I forgot about domain matching and wasted tons of time.

Skill issue ha!

Over to you now:

- How's your day going?

- What do you do on a shit day?

- What was the most challenging day for you?

Please leave a comment and let me know!

Progress

Recap

• I started a SaaS 2 years ago. I failed at making it take off.

• I had a problem: I wasted tons of time and money in creating landing pages that sucked.

• To make it worse, I wasted tons of money on ads that would send traffic to terrible landing pages.

• I spent an insane amount of time learning about copywriting and buyer psychology and I created landing pages that converted

• Unfortunately, it was too late. I ran out of time and money.

• I started a consultancy gig with a friend and I wanted to do something to apply all my learnings and failures.

• I decided to live to share me build something new in public from scratch

• I'm documenting the journey and the actions I'm taking every day. Also adding learning from my experience

• I formulated a hypothesis: "People are willing to pay for a product that makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages."

• I did a few user interviews to confirm the hypothesis.

• After doing enough interviews I had enough confidence to build an MVP.

• I shared the initial MVP with a few people and I got positive results.

• I'm getting ready to onboard customers now

Latest

• As you can imagine yesterday wasn't the productive day that I wanted it to be

• Today after the auth part is figured out I'll look into working with subdomains

• Tomorrow will get a stripe link working and start looking for customers

Celebrations

More and more legends joining the ranks!

• Even on the worst day, the newsletter growth makes me happy, we're at 43 subscribers! 7 more to go for a 50 pushups video!

• The LinkedIn newsletter shows no sign of stopping, 165 people subscribed so far, this is unreal!

• X joined the party! I am at 198 followers there, I can see the number 200.

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