I Almost Quit My Side Project Last Month. Here's What Saved It.
It wasn't more hustle. It was a single mindset shift.
Hey there, Solo Builder!
Last month, I was ready to quit this newsletter.
For months, I’d been putting in the work, writing every week, but something felt wrong. The message wasn't connecting. The feeling was brutal.
My inner monologue was a loop of I'm not good enough and I have nothing valuable to say.
My instinct was to just work harder. To hustle my way out of the problem by creating "better" content. But I was just burning myself out.
The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to fix the content and started to fix the system.
I realized my brand itself was a product, and it had a bug.
I was writing for "solo devs", but my best ideas were universal lessons for anyone building alone. My narrow positioning wasn't just limiting my growth. It was preventing my most valuable insights from reaching the people they could help the most.
So, I did what I so often do as a developer: I debugged my brand.
I reframed the entire vision to be more inclusive while focusing on my unique perspective. The lesson wasn't that I needed to work harder. It was that when you feel stuck, the problem often isn't your effort, it's your strategy.
Sometimes, the highest-leverage work you can do is to stop building the product and start refactoring the plan.
That single shift in thinking saved this project.
Whether that one bugfix is enough to cause a major change remains to be seen. I’m still testing it. But one thing’s for sure:
If it isn’t, that just means I’ll go back to debugging.
What's one part of your strategy, not just your product, that could use a refactor this week?
See you next Saturday!
Join the Other Builders
Every Saturday, I share a short, punchy mindset upgrade like this one, powered by developer thinking. If you're on the solo journey and want to build with more clarity, I'd love to have you.
Saving ideas. Something I’ve started to improve as part of my system is to write down whatever ideas I have that could inspire a post, a note, or a coding project. I write these ideas on anything I can find. Maybe it’s my notebook, my laptop, or a half crumpled sticky note in my periphery. Just saving the thoughts as they naturally form throughout the day saves me the energy once spent on those painful brainstorming sessions when I can’t think of anything.