resistances to growing Intend

from this tweet

💪 "I don't want to be controlling people"

🤑 "then I'd have to decide how wealthy I want to be"

💁‍♀️ more demand on my time

or at least I didn't go into depth on them

Broadly my resistance can divided into two categories:

There was a small amount of resistance here that was simply about having more money and the idea that that might cause people to treat me differently in some way I wouldn't like (like try to get my money). But overall I like being generous and I expect that if I suddenly had a bunch of people trying to get me to contribute to their things, I'd do a good job of figuring out how to manage that.

Most of my money resistance was a lot weirder. As far as I could tell, if I imagined Complice's revenue increasing substantially without me doing anything in particular (eg it gets picked up by a huge blogger or podcaster) then that seemed good... the resistance was more to the idea that I would have a good enough grip on the relevant levers that I'd be able to intentionally make the number go up. Weird.

Marketing is only one thing to call this. This was resistance to taking intentional actions towards growing my business by getting more people in the front door. (Growing the business by making a new integration with another app like Beeminder or whatever has been comparatively easy for me.)

Learned Helplessness

Part of what has discouraged me from working more on growth is how aware I am of various ways in which the product could be improved, and as a one-man company (approximately) I've sometimes felt like maybe I need to work on those first. But there are lots of people who love the app as it is, and fewer than 15k who've ever tried it, so clearly there's lots of room for finding and onboarding more customers without major changes to the system.