The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap founder. This episode is sponsored by padel.com. If you are done having to register for sales tax in some country just to sell your service to one single person there, go check out Paddle. They're a payment provider that takes care of all these things so that you can do what needs to be done. And as I sit here recording this podcast episode, I should probably be doing something else, something more impactful, something that actually moves my business forward, but here's the thing about being a solopreneur.

Nobody is gonna tell you what to do or in what order to do it. If I don't keep myself accountable, nothing will happen. And being your own boss both means having no boss at all and having to be a boss to yourself. I'll be honest with you, I struggle with procrastination on a daily basis. It's so much easier to do the comfortable things, the things that are fun than to tackle the challenging ones even when I know full well that the hard stuff would have an outsized impact on my business.

And right now I'm experiencing this firsthand with my startup PodScan. Now PodScan is almost profitable. I'm almost there. We have the features that the customers want and they're paying for the product, they're subscribing, we just need to find more of these wonderful people. And the obvious solution here is to not build more features, it is to find the right people and tell them about PodScan so that they can figure it out and pay for it.

It's marketing. It's having sales conversations. But over the last month, I found myself drifting more and more into the technical world. I desperately wanted to build new features because that's what I love to do. I wanted to build better data extraction for the podcast episodes, more actionable insights on the UI and to optimize the transcription back ends, all interesting and beneficial activities.

This is all useful, but not the highest impact work that I could be doing. And there's an energy mismatch here and it's very real, I can feel it, I can feel that there's something I should be doing and something I wanna be doing and the energy needed for both is slightly different. And as a founder currently obsessed with AI and this big data pipeline stuff that I'm building, my natural instinct pulls me away from sales and marketing and toward coding. I think a lot of people can probably relate to this if you're a developer. It's so much easier to procrastinate by diving into technical challenges than to write that one important email to a potential customer.

The thing is, I don't even have a problem writing that email and sending it out. I'm an introvert maybe, but with that kind of stuff, it's fine. It's just that I don't have the energy to do it. I don't have the alignment there. And recently, I came across an interesting approach from Peter Levels, he tweeted about this.

Instead of fighting procrastination head on, he does something very interesting and he suggests you doing the same. He has multiple projects that all move toward his greater goal of building this portfolio of companies. So when he doesn't feel like working on project a, he channels that energy to work on to project b. And rather than wasting his time on unproductive activities, he still gets work done in his whole portfolio. I've adapted this approach in my own way.

When I noticed that my technical tendencies pulled me away from sales over the last couple weeks, I did not fight them, I redirected them. It's kind of judo. Right? You take the energy of your opponent and use it against them. I build outreach tools that would facilitate my high impact personalized outreach to my dream customers.

It's still technical work, but it directly serves the sales process that I also do on occasion. I talked about this last week in my dream customer strategy approach. So if you're interested in what this is, listen to that episode. It's it's a generally an approach where I try to find my customers before they find me and help them get the data that they might even be interested in out there to lure them into the system. That's really what it is.

But even with all these things happening, procrastination is still on the menu. And when it happens, I have a process for it. One strategy that has been very effective for me is setting tight deadlines. When I have an urge to build something new or run an experiment somewhere, I give myself a maximum of 4 hours, half a day. With all these modern AI assisted coding tools at my disposal, 4 hours surprisingly sufficient for most prototypes or experiments.

It used to take me a full day or multiple but with these AI tools it actually cuts down the time that I need to get things done. And this approach gives me the best of both worlds here. I get to indulge my technical interests, so I learn something there and I feel like I'm still very technical, the thing I wanna be. I maintain enough time for essential operational work because it's 4 hours half a day and then there's still half a day left for all the other things, the deadline forces me to focus on what's truly important inside the experiment, right? I can't just like meander around to all these random things.

I only have 4 hours. I need to do something meaningful to come to an outcome here and the constraint often reveals whether an idea is actually worth pursuing more or if it's a dead end. So once my half day of experimentation is up, I do the work that needs to be done and the work that has been there ready to be tackled long before the urge to experiment kicked in, well, I get to that then. That's the work that I didn't wanna do, but need to do anyway. And there's kind of an underlying motivational challenge here to see these priorities as they exist in your business and to keep them in a balance.

And what's rarely discussed in solopreneurship or entrepreneurship in general is that we're not just wearing different department hats, like we always talk about how entrepreneurs or solopreneurs have to wear all these hats, right? You have to be a marketing guy, you have to be CEO, you have to be technical and all that, but I think there is a layer here that is under discussed, it's the fact that we're playing different emotional roles too, to ourselves. In a single day, I might need to be this optimist that believes every email could bring a new customer, so I write 20 emails and send them all. Right? I also have to be the kind of the flip side of this, the pessimist who critiques every single email to write a better one next time.

So I have to think, this might not work because of this, but I also have to promise myself that is totally will work and somebody's gonna love it, right? At the same time, I have to be the supporter who celebrates my own small wins when I get a response, when I get a sign up and I have to be a critic who then pushes for improvement for the process the next time around. And just yesterday, I experienced this full spectrum all of these in in one. A customer signed up, I had a conversation with them before, I discovered that they discovered that they had mentions of their work on shows that they didn't even know existed and they shared their excitement with me in a message. It was super validating, energizing, but I also had to force myself to step away from the code editor that I was in when that happened and into my customer support client and to be that other person that is not like trying to tackle challenges, but trying to embrace a relationship.

And I had to be able to do this to make that interaction happen in the first place. And then when it was over, I had to consider leveraging the learnings from that chat for just a couple minutes before diving back into the technical work. And doing the right things at the right time, that's just always hard. I mean, it's hard in any part of life, but particularly in business being able to tackle your work appropriately when you think it needs to be done is never a given. I think this has a lot to do with the wild adventure that is running a business because true balance, this true optimal state does not exist neither for the business nor for its founder.

There's this constant oscillation between good and bad, between things working and not working, between euphoria and depression in entrepreneurship. Some days they bring multiple sign ups, many new subscriptions, it's awesome, and then other days bring cancellations, technical explosions, disaster. The key is not to maintain a perfect balance. I don't think that's possible at all because everything moves all the time, every single part moves. Instead, what I think I've been trying to do which keeps me in business is that I'm always aiming towards the middle.

I'm always aiming back toward the other extreme. I've learned to embrace both the indulgence of playing with new things and the restraint of operating on the things that I know need to be dealt with. I allow myself to explore new ideas and technologies, but within these strict time boxes. And I force myself to do the necessary but uncomfortable work, but I reward myself for it because I know I need to be the motivator too in this relationship, this kind of self reflective relationship. I need to be motivated by something, but I also need to motivate myself.

So whether through listening to my favorite podcast during the task or some music that I really like or taking a workout break afterwards and just getting my body doing something else than thinking all the time, treating myself to a special meal, little snack, all these little things, they work in favor of me doing the things that need to be done. And this is the part that is super hard to communicate to somebody else, even somebody who might be a fellow entrepreneur, but mostly to people who do not have this kind of relationship being their own boss and not being not having a boss at all. The truth is that nobody else can fully understand your unique combination of challenges and experiences as a founder and I mean your own internal challenges and the external ones that come with the businesses. But by acknowledging that misalignment between what we want to do and what needs to be done, well, that is just how it is. That's normal and that allows you to develop systems to manage this productively.

For me, this means embracing the technical temptation that I always have when I look at Twitter, when I look at back on news or whatever while also ensuring that it serves the businesses real needs. It means setting tight constraints on my own innovation while maintaining space for it in the first place. And most importantly, it means accepting the founder's journey as something that isn't about finding perfect balance. It's a constantly course correcting move toward the other extreme, toward the middle. And sometimes I'm too euphoric, I have to kinda get real again.

And sometimes I'm too questioning of everything. I have to move a little bit more towards being an optimist and have euphoria around it. So instead of spending even more time on this thought right now, I guess I'll just course correct and get back to working on the business. And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to the Booster Founder.

You can find me on Twitter at Avid Kahl, a r v I d k a h l, and you'll find my books on my Twitter, Khastad too. If you wanna support me in this show, please tell everybody you know about podscan.fm, leave a rating and a review by going to rate this podcast.com/founder. It makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds and that's where it should be. Any of this will help the show. Thank you so much for listening.

Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.