Is coding a procrastination trap?

💯 Absolutely, yes. So many techies, myself included, suffer from this form of procrastination.

There may be other types of business activities which are actually fun to do. For example you might find that making YouTube screencasts about your app is more fun than posting on Reddit, etc. but has an equal marketing effect. It seems like a lot of the IH journey is about finding the set of overlapping activities that are both enjoyable and profitable.

It can be, but I think there’s also several elements to it. One of which is that fear of having live customers and then something breaks at 1AM, and then you’re up for 3 hours trying to piece it together. Then, you wake up a few hours later to go to your day job. It’s an awful feeling and difficult to accept that the pain associated with avoiding that scenario might be greater or less than the costs of 99.999999999999% uptime and 0 bugs.

Totally agree ! Good article thanks !

Excellent article IMO. Definitely suffering from this but never realized it until now.

It can be, but only if the bottleneck to your growth isn't the product.

Sometimes it is, like when your bug reports have been piling up, and you're still letting the leads pour into your funnel like it doesn't matter.

No, it does matter!

If you let users try out a buggy product, they lose trust in your product, they won't come back, and worse they might even badmouth you on social media (depending on the damage done).

So make it count. Perfect the product. To at least 95%.

(After that, focus 100% of hunting for more users and customers.)

If you pour your leads into your funnel when there are huge holes, not only are you wasting those leads but also making the holes bigger and bigger.

I don't know about themed days, or themed months for that matter, but I feel you should theme your days based on the "most pressing limitation to growth" that your startup currently experiences. It could be marketing/SEO all 7 days for months. It could also be coding all 7 days for months (e.g. MVP development, major bug, scaling issues).

Basically you apply the grease to the squeakiest wheel.

And that's how you grow and prosper!

So hard to read this... hahaha. Great post!