Ship smooth (Ricky Weekly #81)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
I went to Meow Wolf’s OmegaMart in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. It’s a supermarket-themed immersive art experience housed inside an experiential retail space called Area 15. I highly recommend visiting if you’re in Vegas! Here’s one of their fake products.
A thing on my mind:
I wrote two thoughts today but didn’t like either of them. Sharing anyway.
Ship fast by shipping smooth
Running the startup so far, we’ve been pretty disciplined with our efforts. We ship fast, scope projects down, look for insights in data and interviews, and push for clarity on goals and user problems. But there is still a set of projects that we can’t account for that feel important. In the past I’ve used other heuristics, like “if someone feels strongly” it should be given a green light, or it’s a go if it’s just “vision-y.” But they’re insufficient because often we can’t answer the question, “how do we know if we’re successful?” Not answering that leads to a lot of pain.
Most of it comes back to more discipline. We need to get even better at inquiring and getting to the core of ideas. We need better language, metrics, and workflows. For the remaining ideas we feel strongly about but can’t justify, I can probably incorporate some secondary goals to make them worthwhile. For example, one of my investors encouraged me to write more to drive attention to the business, but I dismissed it by default because I’ve thought about it and just can’t seem to prioritize spending the time for something that speculative, until he said that I should think of it as also a way to 1) learn how to describe what we do 2) discover who the audience is and 3) activate our community. Having these secondary goals in mind helped me prioritize and also get more out of the effort.
I’ve tried the blind doing and I’ve tried analysis paralysis. I think I’m getting close to that happy place where I feel like we’re running fast by running smooth. Eager to hear your thoughts if you have any.
Child-like wonder
Someone was saying how hard it is to be a kid these days because everywhere you go, it’s a bunch of people giving you rules on what you’re supposed to do, and how you’re supposed to feel. It feels like we’re stripping away everything that’s awesome about being new to the world like the curiosity and confidence from not knowing.
I admire people who seem to have preserved a strong sense of that child-like wonder. It’s not that they don’t see rules or object to them. They just don’t seem crushed by the weight of them. I remember being a really fearful child because my mom is a worrywart, and my personality developed to stay within the bounds of what felt safe to her. If I hadn’t moved to a new country with a new set of rules and people in my environment, I don’t think I’d ever have pursued entrepreneurship.
Maybe it’s a bit like being a defensive driver. That’s how I’ve explained why some drivers seem “better” at driving than others. To be fair, they teach you to be defensive because that’s how you stay safe, but I think some drivers practice it to the point where driving becomes an anxiety-inducing activity that actually becomes unsafe. That feels like being “crushed” by the rules of the road.
A piece of content I recommend:
Untold: The Rise and Fall of And1 on Netflix
I got so nostalgic watching this short documentary. I was so into the And1 Mixtapes in middle school that I spent way too much time learning the moves. I remember bringing a basketball with me everywhere and just be constantly dribbling. Whenever I was sad I’d just go outside and dribble or go to the park to try the moves on people. I remember working out with the high school team all summer hoping to make the freshman team only to get cut and thinking at least I have streetball…which was this fringe, unconventional thing that I can do and gets me some street cred.
Here’s Volume 3, probably the best one.
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My primary focus (and where I focus) is on Flow Club.