Harsh feedback is the best feedback

TL;DR - A little harsh feedback at work finally got me to ship my product. This only led to more harsh, very-much-needed feedback from friends. Now, I'm building in public.

A few weeks ago, I got some feedback at work. The jist was that I'm good at moving projects from 1 to 1000 but not from 0 to 1. Honestly it hurt. I thought I was decent when it came to the prototyping part of things. Tried to ship things quickly. That said, I'm always a bit cautious we're going to build something we can't maintain. Clearly others notice it too.

I immediately decided I needed to ship my side project. At least to a few people. I sent it the next day to two friends that were aware of the project and wow, did they have opinions.

In January, on a push to start a new side project, I landed on the idea of curated longevity content. Basically, I wanted a project to dig into and I knew I wanted this content. Surely, others must also.

I had been waking up nearly every morning in March and April to build out a website to go along with my newsletter. It was going to be a place for readers to explore the curated and original content sent in the newsletter. The screenshot above is the homepage I'd been building out.

The feedback came quick. My buddies had no idea how to manage the website. The original content was far too much information, the website was an overload. Why mess around with building something myself, just use Substack or ConvertKit to autogenerate a site.

It was painful to hear but they were right. I'd been sitting in the dark every morning, playing around with Javascript calls and Python scripts that were supporting an unnecessary website.

I shifted hard, doubling down on what seems to be most important: my curation of content. I cleaned up delivery into a simple email and started sending to a slightly larger group of about 15 people. It's still very new, but now I can manage it and I'm not left juggling a ton of pieces of tech. Most important, I'm focusing my time on curating good content and delivering with consistency.

A few pieces of feedback got me moving, and killed off a lot of work I'd done. I couldn't be more grateful.