Overcoming Product Launch Paralysis

Excellent is expected. The Inspirational Business Advice Podcast. Hello and welcome to Excellent's Expected. My name is Marcus.

This week's episode is all about software. It's all about taking you on a journey from stymie, from paralysis, from fear of launching, to having the confidence to get your software out there into the marketplace. With me this week is a guest for whom I have a lot of admiration, even though I've actually only known the person for a week. Last week I discovered a brand new app called Ginkgo, and I say brand new because it's brand new to me, but actually it's been around for about a year.

Now Ginkgo is a writing tool which allows you to work with a document at multiple levels, either top level structure, or down and dirty, digging into the content. And I have to admit that as a writer, it's one of the finest tools I've come across in a long, long time. It immediately fits into my workflow. So this week I'm joined by the founder of Ginkgo, Mr.

Adriano Ferrari. Adriano, welcome to Excellent's Expected. Thank you, Marcus. I'll be here.

Oh, I say you enjoy enjoying the product launch. How long did Ginkgo add? Well, this would be the first year that it's been out to open to the public, and there was a year before that of development. The timeline's kind of skewed because I was working on my PhD at the same time, so it's not, it's kind of been slowly becoming more full time as time went on.

So two years after that. That's fantastic. So you were able to actually get an app into the market while studying for a PhD. That's quite impressive.

Well, the PhD's not, it wasn't as much of a time commitment as one would expect. I was lucky in that case. It can vary very much depending on your circumstance, but for me I was lucky that it could be a very part time. Well, that makes sense.

Yeah, I can understand how that varies somewhat. And actually just building on the PhD that we talked about. What is your background, Adriano? Where's the doctor come from?

In physics. How did you get into Ginkgo, if you don't mind asking? Actually, when most people tell, when I tell most people that I'm working on a software project and that I have a PhD in physics, it seems to be like there's a disconnect. But the problem that led me to develop Ginkgo was in writing my thesis.

In writing my thesis I found that I was very dissatisfied with all the solutions out there for writing something as complicated, and that takes place over such a long time like a thesis. So that's where it came out of. So you solved your own problem and that's a, it seems to quite a common trait that people create in apps, doesn't it? Yeah, for sure.

It's a little dangerous though. And because you end up focusing too much on what you need, which is great at first when you're at the initial stages to have that drive to come up with an original solution that satisfies your needs, but you do have to quickly start investigating beyond yourself and see what other people can benefit from in this. I can understand that actually because if you ask solving your own problem, I guess you do sometimes get bogged down with the fact that I'd like it to do this and I'd really like it to do that. I can understand that for sure.

And how's business going? How's Ginkgo's first year being? It's been good. I mean, we are small as just me and a co-founder and recently he went back to being a freelancer, so it's just me for now.

And it's profitable, but it's facing, I think the biggest challenge we're facing right now is that it is too versatile. And I need to find a more specific niche to target. That's really our main challenge right now. So you're finding it yourselves too broad because as I look at Ginkgo myself and it solves a heck of a lot of my problems.

I think we touched on this on Twitter didn't we very briefly. The problem that I had similar to you is that the structure was very difficult to manipulate of any given document. I'm just finishing the book for Exunsexpect. Wow, we'll be able to zoom out and see things and zoom in and see things and focus on detail or structure depending on your needs.

So fantastic. So how can you see that niche and down further? Then where would you take that next? Well, the thing is that essentially I can it's a question of just choosing any one niche because really, I mean, they're criteria by which I think I should choose a particular niche over a different one.

But because it's available and so broadly applicable, if I wanted to, I could literally just choose any one of the niches, whether it's ebooks or a thesis or screenplays or blogs or personal productivity, any one of those. And just focus on it and dedicate the features that I'm prioritizing towards that, the marketing messages and all of that. But it's tricky to do more because of the mindset than the actual procedures involved in choosing a nation and going after it. And that's really the struggle for me personally.

It's difficult to sometimes make the decisions that the time feel very hard, isn't it? Yeah. The fact that you may realistically feel as if you're annoying a particular segment of the audience when it's for the great to go to the business, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah, that's the case. Although I'm slowly and recently, and so I'm still working through these thoughts. They're not really clarified yet, but I'm slowly starting to realize that it's not that my hesitation with this is not really, it's just due to a lack of direct interaction with the market that I do consider that I want to go after first. So the graduate students, researchers and in the academic space.

So even though I am one of them, I do need to do more, talk to more people in that space and really understand what their particular problems are and see if that is really what I can focus on for the short term. And if not, choose something else. But I think what I'm liking is talking to people. It's difficult to get out sometimes and actually do that as well.

You've got your head down and obviously you have a new child as well, which is no doubt taking a lot of your time. So it's extremely admirable raising a young family and developing a new product, of course doing that with a PhD on going as well at the side of it in the early days. It's wildly impressive. And from my perspective, it's amazing to see how far you've come into what is effectively a very, very short period of time.

We live in an age of impatience where people want things so, so quickly. So how did you feel about that personally? Did you feel you were moving fast enough or too fast in the early days? Well, it's difficult because when you look at other businesses and when you're aware of different products, different solutions outside of your business, you're often seeing them once they've hit some kind of breakthrough point.

Otherwise, you just wouldn't be aware of that. So when you compare yourself to those businesses as I have in the past, it just feels like it's very slow. But it's not really, I think it's like you said, it's an impatience and this myth that because you're in the tech space, things go quickly and they explode. And then if it's not getting millions of users a month, then it's not growing fast enough.

And I think that's damaging because, especially in our case, we started bootstrapped so we didn't have any investment. So it is damaging when you start comparing yourself to companies, when you don't actually know what the situation is behind them, and how long they've been working at that particular problem and so on. That's a super point. The fact that when you actually break the surface as a business, it's the first time people, like you say, it's the first time people actually see you.

And if you break with such gusta like the mailboxes of the world or even people like WhatsApp, it would get acquired for a billion dollars by face. We all want that very quickly, don't we? It's almost like an entitlement. I'm in tech, I'm in software.

I'm owed that billion dollar payout, which is such an unrealistic, unattainable goal at times, isn't it? The impatience is very, very challenging. How did you guys launch? That's one of the big questions I had just thinking about Ginkgo from afar.

In a world of investments, in a world of Y Combinator, in a world of large sums of investment, for a business that bootstraps, how did you guys launch? Well, it's funny that you mentioned Y Combinator because our initial launch was simply to, for a while, we had just a sign up form on the page and we just put links in random places. It was a great one thought out. And at some point, we decided, okay, we have enough here to launch it and we just put it up on Hacker News, which is just, I mean, I'm sure your audience is familiar with it.

So there's, you know, you vote up stories and it's usually very much in the tech space and we just got enough votes to end up on the front page there. And so that's where a lot of our initial traction came from. And yeah, I'm not sure how much of that was luck to be honest, but that's how we went about it. That's quite an inspiring story for people that finding themselves so disheartened by not being able to find investment or, you know, not going down this, almost a cool, trendy path of investment these days, isn't it?

And it's encouraging to see a business doing well that hasn't gone down that path. And did you, looking back on that, would you have preferred the investment looking back? Would it have made certain aspects easier or? No, actually, I'm glad that we didn't have that.

And I'm looking back over the whole period of two years, I think it's very ironic. But the decisions that were most difficult and that caused the most trouble, and I think that led to the greatest amount of, let's say, spinning our wheels and not really moving forward, are the ones where we were focused entirely on trying to increase our revenue, essentially. And that's very much counterintuitive, but I think I'm starting to realize that there's nothing that can replace focusing on delivering value. And it's something that's hard to do when somebody's given you hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars and they're kind of like watching to see that explosion that they need to happen.

So I'm glad that we didn't have that. And so when necessary and I'm trying to do more of this now, but just focus on delivering value and just the rest should take care of itself. And it has been so far with this approach. That's a really inspirational approach.

I think that is so, so vital to anyone listening out there who is looking at creating a platform or an app or a piece of software that solves a problem or creates some desire is focusing on actually doing the job really well. Yeah. And here's, I mean, there's a caveat to that, which is, like I said, I'm still having trouble with and need to work on, which is that you're not really solving the problem well unless you're talking to other people and really understanding the problem and not focusing on your solution to the problem, but just really talking to as many people as possible to understand the problem well. And if you do that and then you understand the problem well, then you know you can deliver value and solve that problem to that particular segment.

That does everything you need to in a general extraction. It's all there in that. But the trick is not to fall in love with your solution and just work on the problem in your own bubble and just try to force that down people's throats essentially. You have to talk to people and it's hard.

I would imagine it's difficult almost and we'll get to this in a second. But I would imagine it's difficult to listen to people as well if you saw married to the products that you've created. Yeah, for sure. In a sense, you have to be willing to walk into an interview with.

And again, I don't want to make it clear that I'm still in the process of moving forward with this. So it's not really like knowledge from it's kind of from the trancher. That's what I'm working on right now. So, but the idea is that you have to be willing to walk into customer discovery interview and just actually listen to what they're saying and be willing to scrap your idea.

That's what it turns out that's not working or to look at a different market. It's a combination of both, right? But you can't be married to the idea and it's hard. I think looking at that from the outside, that is so fresh because a lot of, well, pitching it from a different angle, the app culture that we live in, it feels sometimes as if you can sort of get any old app onto the app store or a piece of web software like Ginko is.

And you can kind of do all right with it. And it's refreshing to see someone that's actually taking a business look at this and taking it from the perspective of, right, okay, I have a product that would really solve my problem. But I am very, very willing to listen to what other people say and change my mindset if I need to, as opposed to, well, I'm going to launch a semi, semi-decent app or a semi-decent piece of software. I think it's so refreshing that you've got the attitude of listening and tweaking.

I would imagine it's quite an incremental approach. You know, you make the subtle changes. Is that the approach you tend to take with it? Yeah.

I mean, every path has its danger. So my difficult, like I foresee this being a problem as well that I need to be fully aware of is that I have a perfectionist tendency. And so part of me is worried about going down this approach was I feel is right and I've been reading and investigating a lot about this path. And I'm quite sure that this is what I need to be doing now.

But I also have to be very careful because if you have a perfectionist tendency, that's very easy to get yourself into the cycle of where there's one more thing you need to add and so on. And that segues perfectly into the kind of crooks and the real meat of the episode. I'd like to take the listeners on a bit of a journey. So if a guy's out there that are listening and perhaps you've found a problem that you think you can solve within your business, you have an idea, you have something that you have to do.

You have something that you know will create relevant desire within your marketplace and you'd like to create some software or an app to put out there and to really test that market. I haven't seen it quite a lot with online software myself and with even just websites, believe it or not, what you mentioned there about the detail is so important because you can get hung up on the little things that don't matter, can't you? It's so vital to get over those little hurdles. So the real meat of the episode really is as you know how to overcome that paralysis, how to get over the hurdle of launching.

So, as a starting point, how would you actually define and how did you do this with Ginko? How did you define whether Ginko was viable? That's tricky because like I said, we're learning as we go and at the time it was more a gut feeling based on, because we didn't have a close beta and based on the feedback we got from there. Just to see the feedback we got on the product essentially fell into two camps either there was silence, so the user just didn't get it and just didn't say anything or it was rabid, you know, very very positive feedback.

So, we knew that there is a segment of people that just sees it and gets it and says, wow, I can use this and you know, so that was very encouraging and that's really what gave us the impetus to move forward with. I hear what you're saying on that because I have to admit that the moment I saw Ginko, I was just smitten, I think you put it in an email to me actually, I'm thinking something on the lines of why we are smitten. You know what, I hold my hands up, I absolutely adore it. I think it's such a solution to a problem that I would imagine 60, 70, 80, maybe even 90% of people that write online or write offline for anything, probably have, and Ginko solves it so, so well.

Thank you. Hey, no, thank you. You've made my life so much easier. And think about the whole mindset that you're in as you're developing an app, and as you're developing software.

How did you find that developing? You know, what were the goals when you set out originally and what are the goals now and how have you adapted and changed as a person along that journey? I mean, it's hard because there's this mix of what, okay, let me see if I can, like the goals that I have seen to fluctuate between monetary and benevolent, let's say. And I'm kind of stuck between these two competing forces.

And it's tricky because the actions that the one would take depending on which one you're drawn to or which one you're focusing on very tremendously and has a big impact on the overall and long term process. So I feel like in the process of the last few years, I've been kind of going back and forth in these two extremes and I'm trying to find a middle ground where I focus on quality and trying to solve the problem that people are having. Take time if that's what's necessary, you know, not just push things and try to squeeze more and optimize and all this kind of stuff. And so I think that's the biggest change that's been happening recently in my mindset is trying to shift more towards that and less towards the kind of marketing that you see a lot in, especially in the technology space, which is, you know, assuming that your main goal is to grow, and that you have numbers and statistics and optimization and all these kind of marketing techniques that are useful later on the line, but just I was doing that too soon or wanting to do that too soon.

So that's the biggest change, I think. I'm not sure if I answered your question. I think it's perfect. I think it's the whole thing that I take from that.

And I'm sure that listeners will take from that is that it's back to that impatience, isn't it? To allowing the product to become a product. And in fact, I read an article last week about the difference between a startup and a hobby. And it's moving from being a hobby into being a startup.

You know, the first year or the first two years, it's difficult to accept sometimes that for the first six months, it perhaps is just a hobby. And I think the slowing down what you mentioned there about just slowing down and accepting the fact that you've got a lot of work to do is massive. And it's something that, I mean, I don't know about you, but I've certainly seen people in the startup and the technology scene get so disheartened so quickly because they don't have 10,000 users on day one and 35,000. You know, it's huge.

So it's, I think that's so valuable. So if you are listening out there and you're thinking about creating some software, you're creating added value for your customers through an app or some online process. I guess the key takeaway from that is look, don't get this hearted if it doesn't happen overnight. And it's hard because you hear that as well, you know, it doesn't happen overnight, but it's still, you know, like the amount of exposure that that that companies get when they are growing very rapidly is so far outweighs what the few articles here and there that say it doesn't happen overnight.

It took years. Look at this company. It took several years before they even have their first product that actually got traction and so on and so forth. And it's really hard because it's so pervasive that even people around you that are not in the text, maybe especially people around you that are not in the text base or in entrepreneurship and so on.

And so when you're talking to family or friends and so on, it just, there's very much this current of, you know, hey, you're, you know, why aren't you exploding yet? You know, and it's hard to communicate that that's a false expectation. It's a false hope. Interestingly, that's something that I was discussing earlier this week with a colleague when we were talking about the technology startups and specifically in the software space.

If you said to someone, I have a bricks and mortar retail outlet, shop or a cafe, and after six months, you hadn't been bought out or acquired by a bigger organization. No one would really worry about that. It was just a natural way, wasn't it? Because you're in tech and because these success stories are on the news all of the time.

As you say, people expect you to be bought out within two weeks. And just to highlight how odd this is, it's actually the inverse of what you would expect. So like people who they understand as starting a restaurant or something more, I'd say traditional, I guess, because the model is known. I mean, the model has been around for centuries, right?

They don't expect you to be, you know, having been acquired or have millions of users, millions of in revenue. Within six months or a year, right? And that's even though, like I said, the model is very clear. You know what you need.

You know your costs. It's been done hundreds of times before. And there's so much to guide you in those steps, right? And so to expect in something like software where you can create anything and out of the thousands and thousands of different possibilities of things that you could create, very few of them have ever existed before and very few of them, those actually solve a problem.

So it's odd that software you expect so much growth and so much momentum, whereas in traditional space, you understand that things take time. Speaking of time, actually, that's something that I wanted to get on to, actually, because we talked about earlier and once again, congratulations, because I do know you have a new addition to the family very recently. So alongside the sleepless nights and the nappy changes, how have you found working Ginkgo and developing Ginkgo alongside running a small young family? Has that been challenging?

It's a game of work. Absolutely. And I'd have to say, I always imagined it would be hard. You know, when you're about to be parents, people who are parents tell you, it's going to be hard.

But until you have children, by the way, I do not know. I'm sort of on the horizon short, but I'm waiting eagerly for this advice. Well, I mean, you're going to hear, and I mean, if people are honest with you, you're going to hear that it's very hard. And even having heard that, I underestimated how hard it would be.

But there is a plus side, which is for the first, let's say, I don't know, five, six months, I'd say it was really difficult. But as time went on, and especially now I feel with my wife and I, we are getting into this good flow where we are kind of constrained in how much time we can devote to our businesses, and how much time we can do to our business as well. And that constraint is really forcing us to focus. We don't have a full eight hour day to work, either of us.

We alternate a few hours, I work a few hours, and we're alternating like that. And so we need to get done what most people, if they're in a nine to five or so on, we need to bring that all down to a few hours a day. And it's been extremely difficult at first, but extremely useful of a skill to be able to eliminate the waste and to really focus on effective actions. And we're still learning, but it has improved significantly in the recent few months.

That's so inspirational for people that have got a business and perhaps feel like they struggle with that work-life balance. The whole Parkinson's Law where a job will expand to take the time that is allotted to it. I think you have seemingly conquered that so well because you've just had to. It's quite simple.

You have to and there's no way around it. Congratulations again on that. That's fantastic. Really inspirational.

Sorry, you were just about to say something and I interrupted with my congratulations. I think that was it for managing time and all that. It's just persistent and not giving up on, because we could very easily say, okay, you know what, this is not working. I'm going to have to, because we like the lifestyle we have now when we're working on where we both work from home.

We set our schedules and we like that a lot. And we could have at some point said, okay, this is not working. We're going to have to put our son in daycare and get one of us get a full-time job or part-time job or something. It was a real struggle to persist and say, this is what we want.

This is what we want for our lives. And it's just to keep going until it starts to fit together. It's the persistence. You have the persistence in the software, in the vision for the business.

It appears that you have the vision of your perfect family work life balance as well. And if you're achieving that, then that is extremely enviable for a lot of people. I mean, I don't want to order to say the point. We definitely struggle day in day out.

It's very easy for us. We're still working on this flow and it's very easy for us to get derailed when something doesn't line up. It doesn't line up correctly. And things we just end up having a terrible day with that.

We're still working on it. But yeah, persistence, I think, if there's one thing that you need to have as an entrepreneur's persistence. Absolutely. Or not even as an entrepreneur.

Just somebody who wants to work towards a goal is just that. It's persistence. Our vision is still evolving as well of both the business and the family life. But we roughly know where we want to go in both of these.

And so we just keep at it. I think that's probably the finest advice you can give, actually. Isn't it? You can just keep at it.

Yeah. I love it. So just jumping back to software for a moment then. As the inevitable launch of Ginkgo approaches, you, I guess, because of all the positive feedback, very little negative feedback.

How do you decide what is, in terms of features, what is going to be included in version one and what you will leave out? How do you balance the... You know, I'd quite like it to do this. Fantastic.

How does one decide what to cut? Yeah. Well, at first we didn't really have to decide what to cut because we were very much going with the traditional and very after-peated advice to launch before you're ready. So when we initially launched, there were some key parts of the software that weren't present.

So we weren't really thinking what to cut. We're just thinking, can we launch without this? One of them being that we were limited to three levels of depth. So if you're using Ginkgo now, you can go as deep into an idea or zoom out as much as you want.

But when we launched, it was just three levels, which was somewhat, I mean, very limiting once you've experienced more than that. And so we didn't really have that problem with the cut. But in terms of prioritizing features, that still, as I said, it's really just the hesitation that I have, personally, with choosing one direction over another is quite simply because I'm sitting here in my office thinking about it and not talking to people who are either users or who maybe users who I think would benefit more from Ginkgo than a different segment or who have tools that are, because, sorry to go off in a different direction, but the tools that many writers have, depending on what they're writing, the competition, let's say, is very different. And I think that part of the choice for academic writing and academic areas as a focus is because the competition is less intense there.

And it's not to avoid competition. It just means that the tools that they have are not good enough for what they need. So that's one way that I'm hoping to prioritize. But really, like I said, the problem is that I'm theorizing and I need to get out there and test these assumptions as they say.

What challenges have you faced, actually, on that point? So obviously, talking to your customers is vital in any kind of market. And the brick and mortar businesses that are out there will tell you that the war passed traffic and the people walking and give their opinion. So so valuable.

When you are working the lifestyle that you're working and you are developing software, how do you do that? How can one go about gathering that feedback? Well, it's I think it comes down to intellectual honesty and not tricking yourself. So in theory, with a scientific background, that's something that I should be good at, but it's tricky because it's so easy to say, okay, I'm going to send out a survey and I've done this in the last couple of months.

And you write the survey and say, what do you use? You can go for research papers or writing my thesis or writing a screenplay, project, etc. So I had all these options. And the results came back and it very strongly showed that it was research and both research papers and thesis combined were number one and number two and number three was personal productivity.

But if this were a scientific study, I don't think that that survey would have cut it because the options were kind of weighted towards that. I realized afterwards that it was kind of weighted towards those options. So I was trying to confirm what I already believed. I think that's the most difficult thing.

And the hesitation to go out and talk to people is that it's much harder to rationalize face-to-face interaction than it is to rationalize the data or to massage the data and the statistics to kind of fit what you already want to be the truth. I think that's the most challenging thing. And that's the thing that I think is a strong reason why it's difficult to get yourself to go out there because you're going to know right away whether your dream idea is valid or not because of the person's face. I think that's quite simply the worry.

Something that you see quite a lot in market research is inside DM SQD when we're doing the research into new product development or working on strategic marketing, company, and so whatever that may be. You're right, it's so difficult not to pre-wait the market research, isn't it? And I would imagine that's amplified to the end degree by the fact that you have a product that you've grown and you've built yourself. Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, there's all the time investment and the energy and the feeling that, you know, you kind of at this point, that's why they highly recommend that I wish I had done this earlier, but that you do this first, right? That you do the talking to your potential customers for a much longer period of time before you start building anything. And the reason that until recently that felt that it went counter to some of the things I believe is that the feeling is that it kind of leads you to the future. The feeling is that it kind of leads you to building what other people want without focusing too much on quality, right?

But I think it is, you need to take what you see and learn how in the field it's a. But then you can come up to creative solutions to your problems. So the creativity comes in finding the solutions and not in determining the problem, right? Like the problem is set by the people you talk to and what they say and your input is on how you deliver that solution and what you create to solve that problem.

From the perspective of, you know, we live in an app culture, from the perspective of software and the availability of developers and the, almost the trend of wanting to put software into the system. That's so, so vital isn't it managing to get a solution to a problem and not assume that there's a problem there when one perhaps doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like I said, the trick is really just when you're almost there and when you do have a problem that like, like, it tackles, it does solve a problem.

I mean, I know that it solves my problem and I know that it solves many people's problems. And so in our case, the problem is not that it's not solving a problem. It's not solving too many problems. So that's also another thing to keep in mind.

We live in a world really where people expect too much from things and from a software perspective, the obvious success stories that are out there. Yeah. All come from software that has chosen a specific niche and done that very, very well. So, you know, to see that that's in Ginkgo's future is huge because it's not just solving a writing problem.

I would imagine it is it moving towards solving a writing problem for a specific audience. Well, that's the short term. Yeah. The thing is that, and here's another of those conflicts that I find I come across often is that I have a massive vision for, for Ginkgo itself and for the problems I want to tackle in my life.

And to combine that with where I am now and what I have in front of me, it's very hard to be working on what I have in front of me, which is a writing tool. When I'm thinking about Ginkgo as a completely medium, and sorry if you can hear my son in the background, it's part of the deal at home office. Yeah. So combining what and focusing on the short term.

So, yeah, I want Ginkgo to solve the writing problems for a particular niche. Right. And so right now, like I said, I'm thinking of the academics, but what I want to do is really make it a complete workflow that happens in Ginkgo. So they do their notes openly, collaboratively in Ginkgo, and that slowly becomes a paper that they work on collaboratively.

And the publication process, like I have all these steps in mind for what currently happens and how I think it should happen. And Ginkgo would just be building up on that to eventually my goal with that particular avenue is to change the way that science in particular is communicating collaborated because I think that's a huge. I don't want to say gap, but it's a huge, it really makes me angry and sad to be honest, how poorly it's done now and how much better it could be. So that's kind of the broader, bigger vision that I have for this space.

That makes sense. So we've got the roadmap and we know where Ginkgo has come from. And we know a little bit about yourself, Adrian. So let's talk about your experience and for the guys listening out there who perhaps own a business or work within a business who are trying to really solve a problem for their customers.

As you know, excellent, I expect is all about creating actionable tips and takeaways that people can implement into their own workflow. So I know you've been working on three actionable tips that guys can take away from this chat to implement into their own software development workflow. So let's talk about those for a second. Where do you see that advice?

Well, I'm looking at them now and I see that one of them is actually a meta tip, but you'll see how I mean that. But the first one would be that if you find that you were procrastinating or just delaying a launch or having fear about launching, to really think and try to understand whether that's a personality trait, like it's something about perfectionism, or if it's a lack of clarity that's causing you to delay the launch. Because I think that's really what I've been struggling with and what I realize is that it's not that the product isn't good enough or that there's no market for it or any of that. It's just that really I'm lacking the certainty of this group of people who really needs this and if I just add this other feature for sure they're going to really benefit from that lack of certainty and clarity.

To see any kind of, to trust yourself a little bit and say that, okay, if I'm hesitating on this, is there a reason? Sometimes it is just scary to launch something. But I found that for me it was more lack of clarity and that's what I'm trying to fix now. So in short, if you're delaying something, make sure that it's not for some piece of information you're missing or just to try to get some clarity around that to make sure that it really helped automatically switch your mindset into launching.

So that's a real kick out, it's a real personal kick out isn't it? It's something that you can self-assess even in your deepest, darkest moments when you sat there. And you're perhaps feeling as if you'll never get to launch because the killer feature is not quite there. That's some really strong analysis you can do on yourself isn't it?

Yeah, and really that ties into the next step which is really to give yourself time to think. And I do this on a regular basis, like I literally every Thursday, I wake up at 5.30 in the morning because every day because it's the only quiet time I have to work. So on Thursdays I, you know, around six, I rolled out my wife's yoga mat on the floor, I have a clipboard next to me and I just stare at the ceiling for like 90 minutes just thinking. And it's from those thinking blocks that I have weekly that this clarity comes in.

I mean, you need the data fed in by, you know, talking to people, talking to customers that really like to get clarity on what's holding you back or what needs to be done. I find that it's so easy to just be doing doing and just like scrambling here from this to that, but take the time to think. I think that's extremely important. In a world of impatience, that is some very sage advice people don't, and me included untenable for it really don't sometimes value thinking time.

So that's that's huge. And I want to say one more thing about that is that it's valuable to set that time aside whether you are like yourself or like my wife, somebody who prefers to do rather than to think, or somebody like me who I'd rather think all the time. Whether you're either of those people, it's helpful to to to time box that essentially like every week or however much time you can devote to this. Say you will be doing this thinking like on from a higher level just to get a broader overview.

And that's that's really useful. And a lot of great ideas come from that and that's worth much more than the time investment, but it just has to be consistent and you have to be consistent. And you have to allow yourself to do that regularly as much as you can. I mean, not as much as you can because you can't do too much thinking, like I said, but just add regular intervals to do some bigger picture thinking.

Treat as positive job. I guess it is absolutely part of your job is if in fact as time goes on, it should be more part of your job. I think that's that's the way things go. I think as things get bigger is that you need to start thinking even from a from even higher perspective, you know, instead of five years, you think 10, 20 years down the line and so on.

But yeah, it is part of your job even now. That's a great, great tip. Something that I actually myself thinking about how I can get that into my schedule. Right.

That's fantastic. Yeah, that is so, so valuable. So if you're listening out then you feel like you're struggling for time. Block out some time to think because it will impact everything else.

Yeah, it's a meeting with yourself either weekly or biweekly. And if you do do that, I'd also recommend that you look at John Cleese from Monty Python has a great talk on creativity. And he goes through what he thinks leads to very creative solutions. And the most important in his opinion is to block up regular time to think and some of the criteria for what makes effective thinking in that state.

So if you just Google John Cleese creativity, you'll find a video out there. And that approach is just like it can really unblock you. I mean, like there are times where you're stuck on a certain problem for months, right? And just because you haven't taken the time to step back and really think about it.

That's really, really useful. And I will make sure that for you guys listening out there, the link to John Cleese, John Cleese talking to the show notes as well. I mean, I've not seen that myself. So we'll dig into that.

That's so useful. So yeah, fantastic. Tip number two and tip number three, sir. It's a meta tip in the sense that I've, like I said lately, especially I've been listening to a lot of things and I'm always reading and watching videos on how to improve myself, how to improve my business and all of that.

And it's very easy to absorb all this information, to let it kick around in your head and then not do anything about it. So what I've started doing and I very much urge you, whatever it is that you're listening to, whatever it is you're consuming, to just ask yourself at the end of anything that you watch or see or read, what's the next action for yourself? And even if it's not like you're doing this great thing where you're asking for actionable tips and advice, but even if it's something more general where that's not the case, find the next action for yourself. And not necessarily do it because not everything that's suggested is going to be good advice, but if you have, like you don't have to think too deeply about it because you'll never know unless you try it.

And oftentimes the advice is quite simply, you know, something simple, like this simple exercise or try this thing for your business or what would happen if this were done. Actually, at the end of the episode or the article or whatever, just say, what can I do to try this and set that into your, whatever system you keep trying to your task and so on and try it because it's so easy with the content out there to believe that you've learned all these great things about entrepreneurship or business or personal productivity, but if you're not taking the steps and actually applying them in your own life and in your own business, it doesn't mean you're not learning really. And so that's something I recommend is just what's the next action that I can take? Yeah, the physical, physical action that I can take on this idea that I just heard or this thought or this process.

That's such a valuable way for people to actually move forward, isn't it? You know, to keep that perpetual motion that sometimes we all lack that motivation, the little micro steps that you can take based on the moment of inspiration. You know, if you listen to, excuse me, listen to excellence expected and you find Adriano's talk so inspiring, you know, what action can you take next? Right.

Right. Based on what we're talking about now and it doesn't have to be anything big, does it? No, it can be. It's just as long as you take something from it.

I mean, if you went through the time to listen to it and you found that, you know, it sparked ideas or had some thoughts running in your head, like what can I do to apply this in my life? And it's that switch would make it so that everything you consume, that has relevance to you and that resonates with you actually moves you forward. Right. Super bad advice and something that I'm sure a lot of business owners and a lot of entrepreneurs out there will actually realize they don't actually do, especially in this age of content.

We all live in an age of so much content all of the time, don't be stepping back and marrying the thinking time with the actions. You know, surely that has to be such a catalyst for positive change. Yeah, for sure. That's fantastic.

Adriano, that is superb. Before we close the show, tell people where they can find you online. Yeah, we're at ginkoapp.com and ginko is the trick in the spelling. So the way I'm, it's G-I-N-G-K-O.

If you want to remember, it's getting killer organized are the last three words. So ginkoapp.com or you can follow on Twitter at the same ad ginkoapp. So that's where we are. Adriano, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on and I will continue using ginko for all of my writing.

I assure you, it's such a good tool. I owe you anyone out there to try it. There is a free trial. I'm writing saying so.

Yeah. Super big in it. Give it a go. You've got nothing to lose.

ginkoapp.com. Thanks you guys for listening to Exynx on this expectant. Once again, if you enjoy the show, head on over to iTunes or Stitch and leave a very, very honest review. And by all means, pick up the show notes for this episode and of course, all of the others over at exynxivenexpected.com.

Whilst you're on there, don't forget that you can sign up to receive a copy of my free ebook which will teach you how to regain some of the valuable time that we all lose every single day. Adriano, thank you once again. So it's been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me, Mark.

Don't forget the more you expect for yourself, the more you will excel. Until next time. Bye-bye.