I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Make it exist. Perfect it later.
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Hey Reader, How many side projects are you sitting on right now? I'm guessing at least one. Maybe it's a course outline you keep refining, or a newsletter you've rewritten five times. Or is it a product you want to launch but you feel like isn't good enough? Perfectionism is fear disguised as overthinking. You probably pride yourself on doing a good job and caring about quality. But there’s a point at which it’s just procrastination. You’re likely overvaluing perfection when it’s actually more valuable to put something out into the world and get feedback. People don't need you to be perfect. They just want you to ship something they can use. There's this idea of moving fast to learn. When you're figuring out if something works, move fast and get it in front of people. Once you know it works, then slow down to refine and scale. A lot of creators I know get stuck because they’re starting with refinement. They’re trying to work out every detail before they start. But it might be time to ship something first and then focus on improvement. Something that's helped me is asking if what I'm working on is 80% there. If it provides value at 80%, it's probably ready. Because of the Pareto Principle, that last 20% is going to take 80% of the time. And most of your audience isn’t going to notice the difference. What they will notice is if you never ship at all. As we head into the new year, you probably have things you want to launch or create. If you're using some of your time off over the holidays to work on a project, consider picking one thing you've been sitting on. If it's 80% there and it solves a problem, maybe this is the week to ship it. You'll learn more from one imperfect thing out in the world than from ten perfect things on your hard drive. Make it exist. Perfect it later. PODCASTThe Only Short-Form Strategy You Need In 2026Colin Landforce runs Cut30, where he teaches entrepreneurs to build audiences and businesses through short-form video. Short-form content is still one of the best opportunities available to creators right now. Colin walks through real examples of his students who generated more business than they could handle without a single viral video. We break down his framework for making short-form work and get into:
Watch or listen to episode » ARTICLE60+ ways Kit helped you work less and earn more in 2025We spent this year building features that let you focus on creating instead of managing systems. Some of the updates are things you'll notice right away. Others are small fixes that solve annoying weekly problems. But all of these came from listening to what you actually needed. PODCASTThe Habit That Will Make Or Break Your Entire 2026James Clear doesn't do many podcast interviews, so it's always a treat when he does. He joins Steven Bartlett on Diary Of A CEO for a 2-hour deep dive on the science behind building lasting habits. Whether you've read Atomic Habits or not, this is a good one. Hope you enjoy some rest and time with people you love this week. —Nathan |
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Hey Reader, “You don’t own a jet, right?” That question was not directed at me. I was speaking at Main Street Summit recently, a conference for founders running $5 million to $50 million businesses, and I’d ended up in a group of people talking about airplanes. Three of us were pilots. A man walked up who everyone else seemed to know. Halfway through the conversation, one of the pilots turned and asked him about the jet. “No,” he said. “It annoys me how expensive it is, so I go back and forth...
Hey Reader, Have you noticed house parties aren’t really a thing anymore? We’re spending more time at home than we used to and a lot of us don’t have as many hobbies as we did even a few years ago. My theory is that COVID is to blame and we never fully recovered from it. People share posts about this all the time, so it’s clearly something a lot of us are feeling. And I think what a lot of people do is complain that things aren’t the same anymore and then go back to living their lives. But...
Hey Reader, Wouldn’t it be nice to have more hours in a day to grow your business? I often find myself wishing I had more hours, too. But I have to remind myself that working more only gets me so far. If I work extra hours at Kit this week, I might increase the company’s output by 0.01%. That’s not very much at all. Working extra hours is a way to be more productive, but productivity and leverage are not the same thing. A couple months ago, someone on my team asked me what the difference was...