Option, not obligation to pursue wins

Just because a project shows promise, doesn’t mean you’re obligated to double down all the way. It’s an option, amongst many other options and opportunities.

Your phrasing of “having the option but not the obligation to pursue wins” has stuck with me. Now I think when we don’t push a win further it’s probably our gut telling us that last 20% of optimization might take a lifetime and might not yield the results we think it will. – @LBacaj

Maybe this is how I should be looking at my Carrd plugins project.

Not as an outright failure but as a “good enough” win, even though it didn’t bring me to the revenue goals I wanted.

Because I think I might have already hit the 80% of the win, and as Louie said, pushing the final 20% optimization might not yield the results I want. And that’s pretty spot on to how I feel about my plugins project. After 9 months going hard on it building new plugins, trying different distribution channels and hitting ~$1k/m, the returns seems to be diminishing for the same amount of effort as compared to when I initially started pushing for growth and the revenue tripled. I could double down on this one project for sure and keep hunting for the unlock that will bring me to $5k/m, but it’s still ways off to bridge the $4k gap. Unlikely, I think.

Is achieving 80% of a project’s potential a win, or a fail (even if I didn’t hit my overall revenue goal)?

A win I feel. I can live with that.

In 2019, most of my income came from a programming book ($140K sales). In 2020 from a social media course ($310K). In 2021 from freelancing ($220K). In 2022 from a discord community ($720K). If I had “doubled down” on my first win, I would have missed all other opportunities. – @dvassallo

And maybe to Daniel’s point, just because it showed promise doesn’t mean I should double down, single down on it all the way. Achieving the 80% doesn’t mean an obligation to pursue the remaining 20%. I can maintain steady state at 80% while I seek out other opportunities that can help me cover back the 20% I didn’t pursue for this project, in another project. In all likelihood, another project will top up and go beyond the 20%.

I feel much better seeing my project this way.

A gentler, kinder perspective.