J. William Choi

About

"For a long time I looked completely fine on the outside. Busy, capable, ""successful"", while quietly struggling on the inside. I built a company, hit the milestones, did all the things that were supposed to add up to feeling okay. And still found myself awake at 3am wondering why none of it touched the thing underneath. What I slowly figured out is that mental health isn't something you fix once. It's something you tend to, a little, every day. I'd always treated it as a crisis-only thing, something you deal with when it gets bad enough, or when you hit rock bottom."

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Tastemaker
Tastemaker
Gone streaking
Gone streaking
Gone streaking 5
Gone streaking 5

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I stopped looking

I had a rough week a couple months ago. Numbers were flat, motivation was low, and I was opening my analytics dashboard like 20 times a day hoping something would change. It never did.

So I just stopped. Not intentionally. I forgot one day, then the next, then suddenly two weeks had passed.

When I finally opened it back up, expecting a disaster, I found roughly the same numbers. No crash. No spike. Just the slow steady nothing I'd been obsessively watching.

Part of me felt relief. Part of me felt something worse like the thing I'd been pouring all my anxiety into didn't actually need me watching it every day.

💸 When is a product/maker ready to raise money?

At what point does a product become ready to talk to investors?

When you have users?
Revenue?
A clear business model?
A certain number of people using it?

Especially for solo or small-team makers, it feels twice as hard to reach all of these points alone - while continuing to build the product without income and bootstrapping everything.

At some point, it starts to feel like an infinite loop:

Anyone else get decision fatigue just browsing the feed?

Some days I jump on with a clear goal, grab what I need, and leave in two minutes. Other days I scroll through the daily list and my brain just shuts down. Ten different tools all promising to save me time, and somehow I end up feeling less productive than before I opened the page.

The main issue is that everything looks great in a tagline and a sharp thumbnail. You usually can't tell if something is actually useful until you click in, read the details, and watch a demo. By the fifth product, the overload sets in and I just close the tab.

It creates this weird loop where a site built to help you find tools ends up feeling like extra work, so you leave without trying a single thing.

Does anyone else run into this? How do you filter through the daily noise without burning out? Do you limit yourself to top picks, or only look when you have a specific problem to fix?

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