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

Email address update: You might notice this email came from Beehiiv instead of my regular domain, I’ll spare you the details but will say that list maintenance is important and I got lazy about it so here we are. I’ll try to warm it up again later this year.

For the last few months I have been losing an argument with myself.

It plays out in a document I keep open while I build. Nobody sees it. On one side is the voice that says sell this thing already, you need customers, go. On the other is the voice that says it is not ready, it is not good enough, make it better first. Back and forth, day after day. I read the whole thing back this week and realized the second voice had been winning almost every round, and that it had been lying to me the entire time.

Here is the lie. Building feels like progress. It looks like progress. You close the laptop at the end of the day genuinely tired, having shipped something real, and you feel like a founder who did the work. But your Stripe dashboard has not moved, because the work that moves Stripe is not the work you just did.

I want to be honest about how I got here, because I think a lot of you might feel stuck in the same place and have not named it yet.

I am trying to pull off something slightly ridiculous. Keep just enough GTM consulting clients to keep the lights on, while I build two startups at the same time. One with a cofounder. One on my own, a tool my clients could use instead of Clay. I know, down to my bones, that the thing I most need to do is prospect. Outbound campaigns, the nurture conversations I have been ignoring, every single person who came on the podcast in the last twelve months, the website that still describes what I sold a year ago, the case studies sitting unpublished. None of it is glamorous. All of it is sitting there waiting. And instead of doing any of it, I keep opening Claude Code to build one more feature before I send a single email.

Read that back slowly. One more feature, before the thing that actually makes money. I want to use my own tool to do my prospecting, so the building never quite ends and the prospecting never quite starts.

This trap is older than software. For some founders it is a deck they keep redesigning. For some it is a brand they keep refining, a logo, a font, a tagline that is almost right. The shape is always the same. You retreat to the work that is fully under your control and you avoid the work that involves another human being who can say no to you. But here is what is new, and why I think this is worse now than it has ever been. I am not an engineer. A few years ago that sentence ended the conversation. Today, with the tools we have, I can build real software by myself, and so the most comfortable hiding place in the world is now open to people who never had access to it before. Building used to be the hard part. Now the hard part is the easy part, and the easy part, picking up the phone, is the only part that was ever going to save me.

There was a stretch in the middle of all this where I dipped below the line. Not in a dramatic way. Just a couple of days where I was not excited about anything and could not figure out why. So I made myself work it out. The kids had not slept well over the weekend, which meant I had not slept well. I drank more than usual, and I am choosing to blame my friend Jesse for that. And we had packed the weekend so full that I never got my normal time to think, which compounded the problem. I was tired, my head was full of unsorted thoughts, and I had no room to get any of them out.

The reflex in that state is to push harder. More hours, more bits through the machine. My friend James said something to me once that I keep having to relearn. “It is not time management. It is energy management.” When the tank is empty, more hours do not produce more progress. They just help you make worse decisions faster. The build-versus-sell argument was loudest on exactly the days I had the least fuel to win it, which is not a coincidence. On a hard day, building is the safe choice and selling is standing out in the open with no cover. Of course I kept choosing cover.

And then last week the argument ended, not because I out-reasoned myself, but because something happened.

My first customer signed up. Two hundred dollars in monthly recurring revenue. I know exactly how small that number is, and I am going to tell you about it anyway, because of what it did to me. I have not been able to stop refreshing my Stripe report since it came in. Yes, I know it is supposed to text me when there is a new charge. Let me have this one.

It changed everything, and the size of the number had nothing to do with it. I am back in the game. I am not faking it anymore. I made it back to being a SaaS founder, maybe not a good one yet, but a real one, with a real person paying me real money for something I built. It is not the rocketship Carb.io was, and I am not trying to recreate that explosion. I got a verbal yes from a second person on Wednesday. I am looking for one more after that, three design partners I can give the whiteglove treatment to while we build this thing together.

Here is the part that actually matters. The feature I kept telling myself I needed to build before I started reaching out? I did not need it. It had nothing to do with landing that first customer. All I needed to do was reach out. The entire argument I had been losing for months, the whole agonized document, was answered in an afternoon by one uncomfortable email to one human being.

The build-versus-sell fight was never really about the product. It was about which option felt safer on a bad day, and building won because building is safe. The way out was never one more feature. It was one email, and then another, until a stranger handed me two hundred dollars and reminded me I am allowed to be here.

So I will ask you what I should have asked myself months ago. What are you building right now that you are using to avoid the work you already know you need to do?

Collin

PS - if you’re a founder that could use a few more customers - hit reply, I’d love your feedback on something I’m building.

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.

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