Fighting the Antagonist Mind
Despite working on @VoxRec for over a year, I have not posted anything about the project.
A big part of a project’s success is when other people know about what you have built, yet for many past projects, I did not do this, which I believe contributed to their demise.
I convinced myself that this time it’s going to be different. This time I’ll document my journey and share it with the community. This project is about learning (marketing, ASO, growth hacking, ...)
I have documented it quite well but never shared anything. My Antagonist Mind always pushes back with limiting narratives in the context of
“It’s not good enough”.
When I wanted to write about getting the first paying customer, my mind said
“It was an accidental purchase”
On the other occasion, I thought about writing a post on getting the first “genuine" paying customer who followed the whole funnel and purchased the highest plan, but my mind said
“It was an outlier, I need more data for proof.”
Maybe a great cautionary tale would be about how I got scammed by a reputable (or not) Kickstarter agency, but then I thought
“You’ll look stupid because you should have done better research.”
After 4 months of experiments, I changed the product positioning narrative and went from 2 DAU for the first 4 months to 100 DAU in 40 days. What did my mind say?
“It’s not true DAU if 90% are new users. It’s all organic, but the retention is low and churn is high.”
VoxRec is transcribing over 2.5M words per month!
“Lot of freebies. You’re not profitable."
Reaching $1000 MRR with profit!
“Your organic acquisition dropped 50%, you’re doing much worse than 2 months ago."
I love my mind! But this has to stop and it’s stopping today!
My Antagonist Mind has to take the back seat and accept that it’s OK to make mistakes, it’s OK to fail, it’s OK to say something stupid publicly, as long as it’s OK to learn, get better and move forward.
So, today, with you fellow IHs, I celebrate the first milestone of $1k MRR and 1M of word transcribed monthly
Per aspera ad astra!
Congrats on the milestone!
I have a weird trick that oddly helps me a lot:
Whenever I have thoughts like this coming up I just imagine an annoying 13 year old saying them to me. Makes is much easier for me to see how irrational they are and as a bonus, I can just tell that voice to shut the fuck up :D
That's a good one :-D
These are very honest words. Our mindset is so foundational to everything that we do in life. After you've been kicked off the tree, do you choose to stay on the ground or pick yourself up? Our resoluteness, discipline and self-reflection keep us going when we feel like packing it all in.
I have a similar mentality - the self-doubt I'm able to impose on myself is fascinating.
I think it's a combination of setting high expectations for oneself and being surrounded by lot of online hype of any kind (rarely people talk about failures and the day to day struggles)
very true
This is me in so many many ways thinking this is not ready, this is not good enough yet, wait just wait..
This is a bold move, congrats!
A lot of people do have a similar mentality, it is very important to push things further even if they are not perfect. Those who manage to overcome that kind of self-doubt, will stand out and generate great success. I witnessed great products and companies going down because their leaders did not find it good. Also, its important to set proper measurement goals.
Very, very relatable. I guess, this happens to us because we are so accustomed to failure that when 1 time a good thing happens out of 9 bad things that have happened, we think that is unusual. That's why our brain try to figure out a reason.
And maybe that's why they say that we should celebrate small happiness :)