Dear founder,
As I sit here writing this newsletter, I should probably be doing something else.
Something more impactful. Something that actually moves my business forward.
But here’s the thing about being a solopreneur: nobody’s going to tell you what to do or in what order to do it. If I don’t keep myself accountable, nothing will happen.
🎧 Listen to this on my podcast.
Being your own boss both means having no boss and having to be … a boss. To yourself.
I’ll be honest with you: I struggle with procrastination daily. It’s so much easier to do the comfortable things than to tackle the challenging ones, even when I know full well that the hard stuff would have an outsized impact on my business. Right now, I’m experiencing this firsthand with my startup, Podscan.fm.
The Technical Temptation
Podscan is almost profitable. We have the features our customers want, they’re paying for the product, and they’re subscribing. We just need more of those wonderful people. The obvious solution isn’t building more features – it’s finding the right people and telling them about Podscan. It’s marketing. It’s sales conversations.
But over the last month, I found myself drifting more and more into the technical world. I desperately wanted to build new features: better data extraction, more actionable insights, optimized transcription backends. All interesting and beneficial activities, but not the highest-impact work I could be doing.
The energy mismatch is real. As a founder currently obsessed with AI and big data pipelines, my natural instinct pulls me away from sales and toward coding. It’s so much easier to procrastinate by diving into technical challenges than to write that important email to a potential customer.
The Judo Move: Redirecting Energy
Recently, I came across an interesting approach from Pieter Levels. Instead of fighting procrastination head-on, he suggests having multiple projects that all move toward your greater goal. When you don’t feel like working on Project A, you can channel that energy into Project B rather than wasting it on unproductive activities.
I’ve adapted this approach in my own way. When I noticed my technical tendencies pulling me away from sales, I didn’t fight them – I redirected them. I built outreach tools that would facilitate high-impact, personalized outreach to my dream customers. It’s still technical work, but it directly serves the sales process. I talked about this approach last week in my Dream Customer Strategy approach, if you’re interested.
The Four-Hour Rule
Still, procrastination can happen. And when it does, I have a process.
One strategy that’s been particularly effective for me is setting tight deadlines. When I have an urge to build something new or run an experiment, I give myself a maximum of four hours. With modern AI-assisted coding tools, four hours is surprisingly sufficient for most prototypes or experiments.
This approach gives me the best of both worlds:
- I get to indulge my technical interests
- I maintain enough time for essential operational work
- The deadline forces me to focus on what’s truly important
- The constraint often reveals whether an idea is actually worth pursuing
Once my half-day of experimentation is up, I do the work that needs to be done. The work that has been there, ready to be tackled, long before the urge to experiment kicked in.
The work that I didn’t want to do — but need to do anyway.
It’s a motivational challenge to see these priorities and keep them in a balance.
The Daily Dance of Emotions
What’s rarely discussed in solopreneurship is that we’re not just wearing different department hats – we’re playing different emotional roles too. In a single day, I might need to be:
- The optimist who believes every email could bring a new customer
- The pessimist who critiques that email to write a better one next time
- The supporter who celebrates small wins
- The critic who pushes for improvement
Just yesterday, I experienced this full spectrum. A customer signed up, discovered mentions of their work they didn’t know existed, and shared their excitement with me. It was validating and energizing. But I also had to force myself to step away from the code editor and into my customer support client to make that interaction happen in the first place. And then, I had to consider leveraging the learnings from that chat for a while before diving back into the technical work.
Doing the right things at the right time is hard, and being able to tackle your work appropriately is never a given.
Finding the Middle Path
This has a lot to do with the wild adventure that is running a business. True balance, a true optimal state, does not exist — neither for the business nor for its founder.
There’s a constant oscillation between euphoria and depression in entrepreneurship. Some days bring multiple signups and subscriptions; others bring cancellations and technical disasters. The key isn’t to maintain perfect balance – that’s impossible. Instead, it’s about always aiming toward the middle.
I’ve learned to embrace both indulgence and restraint. I allow myself to explore new ideas and technologies, but within strict timeboxes. I force myself to do the necessary but uncomfortable work, but I reward myself for it – whether through listening to a favorite podcast during the task, taking a workout break afterward, or treating myself to a special meal.
The truth is, nobody else can fully understand your unique combination of challenges and experiences as a founder. But by acknowledging that misalignment between what we want to do and what needs to be done is normal, we can develop systems to manage it productively.
For me, that means embracing the technical temptation while ensuring it serves the business’s real needs. It means setting tight constraints on innovation while maintaining space for it. Most importantly, it means accepting that the founder’s journey isn’t about finding perfect balance – it’s about constantly course-correcting toward it.
So, instead of spending even more time on this thought, I’ll get back to working on the business.
If you want to track your brand mentions on podcasts, please check out podscan.fm — and tell your friends!
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