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, If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be? This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that. There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love. However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent money on something and immediately felt guilty afterward? Will Guidara spends his money foolishly on purpose. And he thinks you should too. He once bought an entire barrel of whiskey and put it in his basement. He also put a skee-ball machine in the office. Is he going to get a monetary return on either of these things? No. But that’s kind of the point. He calls it the 95/5 rule: Manage your money and time like a maniac 95% of the time (no expense is too...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent a whole day on something almost nobody saw? It's painful when the whole reason you worked hard was because you wanted to reach people. If you teach a workshop in person, you reach the 20 people in that room. But if you record that same workshop once, you can keep teaching for years on autopilot. This is the concept of leverage, and it's something I talk about in my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth (you can pre-order it now). A lot of people will look back...