The one where we don't need to do better every single week

Not every week needs to be a growth week

Hi friend,

I’ve been heads-down building out new features (and fixing bugs) for Govalo all week. Anyone who has released a product knows that as soon as customers get their hands on it, your feature roadmap completely mutates and the magical bugfix fairy delivers a continued string of new bugs for you to fix. It’s part of releasing an MVP.

One thing that’s been particularly difficult for me for this time is trying to measure progress. Sure, our user count is growing (which is exciting!) but not at the pace I was hoping — contradicting my concurrent feelings of not feeling ready to market the app because of these bugs I need to fix. (We’re still a full stack team of one, but have two amazing engineers starting in November and we’ll be hiring a third shortly.)

Which inspired this quick email today as a reminder to myself and to you:

Not every week needs to be your best week. Not every week is going to show progress.

Hell, you’ll have weeks where you feel like you’re regressing, and it’s completely normal. Maybe you go on vacation for a bit, or you’re burned out from this everlasting pandemic, or your head and heart are just not into it. We as entrepreneurs face a multitude of new requests, issues, positive news, and negative news every single day, and what we set out to do one week is likely not how we are going to finish the week.

Give yourself the grace and permission to have what may feel to you as an off week. And maybe it is. But to someone else, your off week may be a huge step forward to them. Progress isn’t linear, and no two individuals have the same line of progression.

I know the image I included in this email is one that’s been shared 9,000 times before, but I can’t stress just how true it is. So now you get to see it again.

If you’re still feeling down on yourself for not completing everything you wanted to do or not nailing something you’ve been learning, take a moment to reflect on your week. What did you accomplish? What positive feedback did you receive? What are you most proud of? What are you looking forward to accomplishing next week? There is plenty to celebrate, even if your week did not turn out as intended.

Until next week,

Kelly