Pieter Levels Inspired Me to Stop Procrastinating and Start Shipping

Mid-Life Crisis?

In June 2020, I turned 42.  I have a beautiful wife, two awesome sons, a nice house, and a great, loving and supportive family. Even my 9 to 5 agency job is REALLY great – great environment, great bosses, no typical corporate BS, fun projects (mostly), and a solid non-Silicon Valley salary.

But in spite of this something is missing. I constantly find myself stuck in an infinite loop of failure and frustration.

Over the years I’ve read and listened to countless entrepreneur and start-up articles and podcasts.  I’ve done freelance WordPress and custom websites.  I’ve worked on personal projects.  But I never keep momentum and I never launch my personal projects.  In fact, I’ve been working on the same current project for 4 YEARS and it’s never moved from my local virtual machine – I begin, get stuck, delete, restart, get stuck, delete.  It’s straight up insanity!

Just before my 42^nd birthday, I came across a talk by Pieter Levels in which he explains his process of building successful startups.  From there I read Pieter’s blog where he details his 12 Startups in 12 Months philosophy and details his journey from failure to huge success as a bootstrapped indie maker. If you have been living under a rock (like I had been) and have not heard of Pieter Levels’ start-up journey, I suggest you stop reading this and learn more about how he’s succeeded in cracking the start-up code:

•  Pieter Levels blog
• Turning Projects Into Profitable Startups
• Confronting Your Fears and Taking a Leap with Pieter Levels of Nomad List (Indie Hackers interview)

You Need to Launch

What I learned from Pieter’s journey is that, although failure can be soul crushing, it is part of the process to find a successful startup. Without the failure, it is hard to recognize success in the early stages of your project.  What SHOULDN’T be part of the process, is never launching.  You need to launch to validate what you are working on.  And you need to LAUNCH FAST.

My biggest problem to this point has been that I never launch my own projects.  I hmm-and-haw over them. I think of a better way to achieve something in the code.  I think of new ‘nice-to-have’ features before I’ve finished current ‘need-to-have’ ones.  I complicate the MVP (minimum viable product) for each of my projects because I keep adding features for the ‘what if’ and ‘well this will be useful later’ scenarios.

Learning from Successful Makers

What I’ve learned over the past few months from Pieter Levels’ blog and Courtland Allen’s IndieHackers.com podcasts and website (again, if you’ve been living in your own coding bubble like I have and have not checked out IndieHackers.com, stop reading this and check it out), is that successful makers ship. They build quickly and get a decent usable product to users early so they can validate the idea and pursue it if it gains traction, or pivot if it does not. Getting the project in front of even a small amount of initial users provides makers with momentum and motivation, and much needed user feedback.

No one is validating my ideas because no one ever sees them. The longer I build in isolation the more likely I am to

1. lose motivation (i.e. burnout)
2. get distracted with extra features
3. build a product no one wants

I create in a bubble, and once I lose motivation (because I’m receiving zero feedback – positive or negative – or run into a problem I can’t solve) I lose momentum.  When I lose momentum, I leave the project for a few weeks and when I come back I scrap and start from scratch. Insanity.

A New Beginning

Sooooo, what I’ve decided to do is restart my own journey to become financially independent by building AND LAUNCHING one of my projects.  I am not sure which, if any, of my project ideas will be profitable, so I am going to assume none of them will be and start this project with low expectations.

“WHAT?! Why would you be so pessimistic?” I hear you asking, so I’ll explain: As Pieter Levels (and many successful makers) explains, if I put all of my eggs in one basket thinking Project X will be the startup that brings me to my financial freedom, like I have in the past, I fear I’ll continue spending too much time solely on perfecting Project X. However, if I enter each project with a list of features to build an MVP, and focus on completing those features and launch, without the distraction of “oooh this is going to be huge so I need to make this feature better” or similar, then I’m more likely to

1. actually finish the project and launch, and
2. listen with an open mind when users critique my project after launch.