Pushers and pullers - Or how I entrepreneur the wrong way

Push your ideas and products to get users to push you back and, in the end, pull you.

I’m an unrelenting pusher. No, not I don’t push drugs. I push my products and ideas to people instead of looking for their pain points and creating solutions to real problems.

I do believe in the pulling approach. It makes so much sense. I tried doing it. Sincerely. Well, maybe asking my colleagues to do it for me, but I tried for a bit.

The big problem is that to do the pulling, you need to conduct activities I don’t enjoy: networking, meeting people, and building relationships.

I’m an ambivert and am OK meeting new people, but doing it as a habit is far too draining for my lone wolf spirit. So, I’m deciding to go for broke.

I will multi-track! I spent time and effort building a project and task management tool, so I want to give it a chance to survive. If I build enough tools, someone who is interested in one of them will be exposed to any of the other products and may find them interesting as well. They may find them interesting enough to critique them and provide feedback.

I avoid spamming people with information about software they don’t care about; only once they start caring do they start talking to me.

I’m not saying, “No marketing!” Content marketing will remain a mainstay of our work.

My new motto is value in everything we do. If you land on our pages, I hope you don’t go away regretting wasting your time - well, unless you were looking for something different, in which case the search engine that didn’t understand your search intent is to blame.

So, my apologies if I push my ideas of what is fun, what is good for you, and what works. If a few of you find the tools we build will be helpful enough to give meaning to our efforts.

And we will definitely listen to you! If you want to change how this works, let’s dig into why and how we can make it work. We are actually eager to be pulled. But how to kickstart the pulling is the hard part, and we decide to try pushing before you push us back.

Part of me wonders: Am I fooling the sensible part of myself, or am I making something sound good to overcome rational objections to such an initiative? Am I convincing myself to be knowingly foolish? Perhaps. Yes, there is a good chance. At least I’m testing it out in real life and putting some skin in the game. Not so much financially as emotionally and my sense of self-worth.

But let’s do the 10 - 10 - 10. What will I think of this decision in 10 minutes? I will still feel the cheerful glow of having decided; it’s done; let’s go for it. What will I think in 10 months? I will be either elated because things are going well or depressed because I’m not being pushed back or somewhere in between. In 10 years? If things go well, I will still probably write similar blog posts and push more egotistical ideas onto the defenceless rest of humanity. Talk about egomaniacs. If things go badly, I will pursue some other megalomaniac project - perhaps finally writing my fantasy saga of tens of books - and have made this experience a good anecdote and wisdom to share with friends and family.

But I went into it knowing it could go badly. I will suffer if it goes wrong, no doubt about it. But if I’ve learned anything about my past failures, they often brought good learning and eventual good outcomes. I will write more about the topic later.