I tell everyone to ship earlier. I say it in comments, I say it to friends, I believe it. And I've been sitting on a landing page rewrite for three weeks because it's not "ready."

The advice is good. The problem is that giving advice and taking it are two completely different activities, and the first one is much cheaper. I suspect this is universal and nobody admits it.

So: what's advice you genuinely believe, that you give freely, and that you routinely ignore in your own work? And the harder follow-up: is it actually good advice that you're failing to follow, or is it advice that sounds good but doesn't survive contact with your actual situation?

I'm asking because I want to know if "ship earlier" is advice I should keep giving, or advice I should stop giving because I can't even follow it myself.

We spent months trying to build groundbreaking, AI-powered workflows that would blow our users' minds. But when we looked at our power users versus our churned users, the difference was tiny and mundane.

Power users had positioned our app right in the middle of their existing morning browser tabs. Churned users treated it like a utility tool something they opened once a week, forgot about and eventually cancelled.

Imagine that you are about to join a startup (before raising funds) as a part-time employee.
You are paid for work (compensation is like in any existing, well-established company in the industry, but you do not have regular employee benefits covering 401 plan, no equity, no health care plan, HO equipment fee, etc.)

You hope that after raising funds, you will become a full-time employee and receive benefits.

For the past year, we ve been building a specialized SaaS tool. Our entire value proposition was a specific automated workflow that saved our users about 10 hours a week. We charged $49/month for it, and we had a solid base of 80 paying customers.

Then, on Tuesday, a massive, billion-dollar incumbent in our space announced their quarterly update. Buried in the release notes was the exact feature we built our entire company around. And they are offering it for free to anyone on their $10/mo enterprise plan.

I have been building, learning, searching, investing for the last 6 years, back to back, non-stop. I feel I have officially reached burnout. One week I am super into building and I code new things like crazy. And the next I just want to chill and go surfing lol. Do you go through a similar phase? How do you deal with the constant change of emotions?

I don t mean this in a disrespectful way or anything like that, but throughout my life, I ve come across (and I m sure you have too) several products whose actual usefulness wasn t exactly impressive, but their creators still made a huge amount of money.

For me, for example, it was:

• Fidget spinners (2017). At the peak, the global market was estimated at hundreds of millions to over $1 billion.

• Metaverse land (2021) valuation could be for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars each, with the overall market reaching hundreds of millions during the peak hype cycle. I bought one too. :D (actually was scammed).

• Pet Rock (1975) the creator became a millionaire within a few months.

Not a pity post I've recovered and I'm launching again in six weeks. But I want to write down the post-mortem while it's still fresh, because I made three mistakes that I now see everywhere in other people's launches.

Mistake one: I treated the launch as the marketing, not a moment in an existing marketing motion. I had no list, no audience, no warm network on PH. 63 upvotes was basically my friends plus luck.

Mistake two: my tagline described the category ("AI-powered project management") instead of a result. Nobody clicks a category.

Mistake three: I launched on a Tuesday because "Tuesday sounds good." I had no idea what else was launching that day. Two well-known companies launched the same day and I was invisible.