Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

GTM Club reminder: next friday at 930am PT, I’m hosting our next session. It’s an open invite/agenda, I collect a list of things folks are struggling with and try to unblock them by sharing experience. Hit reply if you’d like to join.

Back when I was first starting voltageCRM, my now wife had a nickname for me. The ghost of dirty dishes.

I'd get home after she was already in bed, eat whatever leftovers were in the fridge, and leave the dishes in the sink. We didn't have a dishwasher. She'd wake up to a clean kitchen minus one plate, one fork, and one husband. Never saw me, but the evidence was always there. I was an inconsiderate jerk back then. I still am, but I used to be, too.

I'm bringing this up because I did some math this week and I didn't like the answer. I've been on my bike maybe five times this year. Five. It's July. My magic cards are sitting in boxes I haven't opened in weeks. I used to spend whole evenings building decks or playing with friends. Now they're just furniture.

The ghost is back. But he's different this time, and I think it's worth explaining why, because I don't think I'm the only founder haunting his own house right now.

Part of it is simple math. My time is split three ways. Consulting during the day, then Predictable, then ReplyLoop. When you're running on thirds, the evening stops being optional. It becomes the only slot where anything gets finished.

But that's not the real problem. Founders have always worked nights. I worked nights fifteen years ago and it didn't feel like this.

Here's the difference. Back then, working at night meant working on the fun stuff. The side projects. The things there was no time for during the day. Everyone would go home, and I'd fire up WordPress and install a new theme, or tweak the design, or add some little feature nobody asked for but I really cared about. It was my non-work work. And here's the thing about that work: it was engaging, but it wasn't addicting.

There's a distinction there I've been chewing on all week. That old evening work gave you a dopamine hit, but it was an internal one. You made the thing look better and you felt good about it. Quiet satisfaction. Nobody replied. Nothing pinged. The feedback loop started and ended inside your own head, which meant it wound down naturally. At some point you got tired, felt good about the shift you put in, and went to bed.

Compare that to a reply landing in your inbox. That's externally generated. Someone out there responded to something you did. That's the addicting kind, the slot machine kind. And historically, the evening shift didn't have it. Prospects don't reply at 10pm. The addictive part of the job kept business hours, and the evenings belonged to the slow, internal-dopamine work.

Claude Code broke that arrangement.

Building used to be the slow work. Now it's interactive. You describe a thing and minutes later the thing exists, and it talks back, and there's always a next step sitting right there. Work that used to feel like woodworking now feels like a conversation. Like a game. The external feedback loop moved into the evening shift, and it brought the slot machine with it.

I want to be precise about what this feels like, because I've seen people describe it as anxiety about the agents, like you're beholden to them, like you need to keep them alive. That's not it. I don't feel obligated to the machine. What I feel is smaller and sneakier. It's the little moments. My wife is reading the kids a bedtime story. I've got fifteen minutes. I could relax, or play a game, or just sit there and be a person. And instead I find myself back in the chair, bouncing the agents a little further down the road. Just a bit more progress. It's always just a bit more progress.

Separation anxiety is the closest name I have for it. Not from the work. From the momentum.

And here's the real cost, beyond our kitchen's cleanliness. When all the little moments fill up, all those in-between times, you lose the ability to drift. When you always feel like you could be productive, you lose the ability to feel like you can take a break. I've lost that these last couple of months, and I can prove it.

There's a group of guys I could go play cards with this afternoon. Here's what runs through my head instead. What if I miss shipping the feature a Predictable customer is going to need next week, and they churn because of it? Then that afternoon of cards just cost me a customer. Hundreds of dollars. Maybe thousands. So how do I justify risking thousands of dollars to go slack off for an afternoon?

I'm not saying that math is right. I'm telling you it's the math I've been running. And notice what makes it so effective: the downside is specific and countable, and the upside is just an afternoon. The math never comes out in favour of the break. Not once. It can't. Which is exactly why the math can't be the thing in charge.

The bike used to be where I drifted. An hour of climbing with no phone, and somewhere around minute forty the thing I'd been stuck on all week would untangle itself. But I want to be careful here, because that was never the point of the ride. The moment the ride has to earn its keep, the moment it needs to produce an insight to justify itself, you're right back to running the math. Some rides untangled nothing and they were still good rides.

The evenings and the in-between moments used to protect themselves. Work simply couldn't follow you into every fifteen-minute gap, because the addicting part of work was asleep. Now it never sleeps, and the gaps don't defend themselves anymore. If you don't deliberately protect them, they're gone.

So I'm going to try something simple. I’m going for a bike ride this afternoon and I don’t care if it loses me a potential hypothetical future customer. Because that future customer isn’t real. They’re pretend. 

The ghost of dirty dishes was version one of this problem, and version two is harder. The work is genuinely more fun now. That's exactly what makes it dangerous.

What's your version of the bike, and when did you last touch it?

Collin

The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers is the playbook for founders who never planned to do sales but have to figure it out anyway. It pulls together 13+ years of building software startups, building outbound systems for hundreds of B2B startups, and more failed experiments than I'd care to admit, into a practical guide for finding your first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers.

It will help you build a repeatable way to find customers without losing your weekends (or your soul).

Order now and you'll unlock a stack of exclusive bonuses I actually use with my consulting clients: Email me the receipt and I’ll share the resources.

Email me your receipt and I’ll share the resources.