Why do founders spend six months building and six minutes on positioning?

I've been watching this happen in real time, including in my own launch prep, and I don't have a clean answer for why it keeps happening.

Six months on architecture. Six months on edge cases. Six months making sure the thing actually works. And then, somewhere in the last week, "okay, what do we even call this" gets solved in an afternoon, usually by whoever's still awake.

I don't think it's laziness. I think building feels like real work because you can point to something at the end of the day; a feature that didn't exist yesterday exists now. Positioning doesn't feel like that. You can spend three hours on one sentence and have nothing to show for it except the same sentence, slightly different. It's real work that looks exactly like no work at all, so it keeps losing the fight for attention against tasks that visibly move.

Here's the thing, though, and this is the marketer in me speaking: the product only gets built once. But the positioning gets tested every single day, in every headline, every cold email, every scroll-past-or-stop decision a stranger makes in half a second. You'll live with six minutes of thinking for years. That ratio should really concern more of us than it does.

I say all this fully implicated in my own mirror. I've spent 35 years getting good at positioning for other people, and I still caught myself giving my own launch page less time than it deserved, right up until I forced myself not to. Ugh.

Launching tomorrow. Turns out "physician, heal thyself" is harder than it sounds. Ha.