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, "People in my generation just don't work anymore." I laughed. The guy who said it was 20 years old. I met Liam Miller while I was in Dubai for the 1 Billion Followers Summit. I was recording an episode of my podcast, and Liam stopped by the studio to hang out and record some content of his own. He runs a short-form content agency called Shot Social, and the results speak for themselves: He helped scale Diary of a CEO from 150,000 to 1.5M followers in 12 months. His own videos...
Hey Reader, I started my career as a designer, so when I had the opportunity to sit down and interview Bill Burnett and Dave Evans for my podcast, it felt like meeting legends. Dave was the product manager for the original Apple mouse and was a cofounder of Electronic Arts. Bill worked at Apple for seven years on the team that pioneered the modern laptop. Getting to talk with them was really special for me. They took everything they learned designing products and applied it to designing your...
Hey Reader, Years ago, I was walking along the Seattle waterfront feeling confused and sad. I'd just attended a design conference. The content was great, but I hadn't met anyone. I was too shy to introduce myself beyond small talk with whoever sat next to me. Ahead, I noticed some of the speakers walking together. People I looked up to. They looked like a group of close friends, laughing and joking. That was the circle I wanted to be part of. I picked up my pace so I could catch up. I got...