08 Building in Public: Shooting our shot

Well, after a minor internal battle, Shannon won.

Instead of going the landing page route, we’re just going to launch instead (very soon). We have our launch strategy and our branding lined up. Sure it’s not perfect, but whatever. If we wait until it’s perfect then we’ll never do it. Perfectionism is literally the antithesis of doing.

Okay. Back to the struggle.

I wanted to go the landing page route (build excitement, increase subscribers, etc.) as discussed in last week's letter.

And this was Shannon’s response: Why? What’s the point? Let’s launch.

And I literally had no good reason, so that’s what we’re doing. We’re launching.

Sure, we don’t have as many followers as we’d like, sure we’re starting from scratch and it will look a little awkward. But that’s okay. Only one way to do it. And that’s to rip the bandaid off.

This brought up an interesting question (internal struggle?) that many people face. Why do we prolong things? The Landing page idea was a clear cop-out on my part. It was procrastination in it’s finest form

Me: “Let’s spend time building a landing page, promoting that page, and driving traffic there instead of our real site!!!” This is basically how it could have sounded. It’s fake work as opposed to real work. Real work moves the needle. Fake work makes us feel good by ticking off some boxes and saying, “ah yes, another day, and another to-do list done”.

But the to-do list is usually complete bullshit. We just like the dopamine hit.

Often to-do lists are mere illusions of effort. They actually don’t make advancements toward a specific goal.

Don’t tick boxes. Rather, we need to ensure we’re not losing sight of our main goal. And our main goal (to be brutally honest) is to make money. And we do this by helping CPAs find their dream job. And we do this by getting awesome employers to post their jobs with us. So, why drive traffic elsewhere? We need traffic to our actual site.

This got me thinking.

How do we avoid this moving forward?

The simplest way I’ve found is to be brutally honest with myself. Is this thing we’re doing really worth it? Or is it just something to do because we’re nervous, scared, or lazy to do the real work? After asking this question it became very clear.

Yes, the landing page idea and all that nonsense was pure deflection. I was just a little scared. Nothing more. Nothing less.

So, to wrap this newsletter there are three main points:

1. To-do lists are useless. Rather, create tangible steps to reach your goal.
2. Don’t be fooled by ‘progress’. Ticking boxes is not progress.
3. If you’re doing fake work, maybe there’s just no work to do?? And that’s OKAY.

Bonus: we are launching soon 🚀🚀

We’ll send out a link ASAP for everyone to cruise the site. All feedback will be welcomed. (maybe).