February 18th, 2020 | Panicking

Wore up early in the morning, 6 AM. I’m going to pump out some leads.

Yesterday morning I tried to get some leads from online resources and enrich them and add them to the list. It took forever… Like, 5 leads in two hours… This can't be happening. This is not feasable. I’m panicking.

Today I realised I  should be very serious about this. This is my big test. I have to deliver a killer product to my 10 paying customers. I have two weeks.

I use the Pomodoro technique instead of saying  “I will work for two hours”. 25 minutes focused, 5 minutes break. Twice  as productive, instead of 5 leads in two hours, 10 leads in two hours. But still, what the fuck, so slow…

Now I’m at work as I’m writing this and this morning I was panicking a bit. “I have to automate this” I told myself in my head about 100 times on the way to work. But now that I was forced to sit down (at work) I relaxed a bit and realised that I  am thinking way too much.

This is a premium product, an exclusive, human curated  list. It’s not about the numbers. It’s about the quality. So, I can start eliminating many rubbish startups I see. If people wanted to see any bullshit company that raised money they would just go to Angellist and Crunchbase.

Side note: you can’t even imagine how many garbage startups raise money with just an ugly Wix or Wordpress landing page and an email box. Even funnier  is that they are not even brand new companies, they are 2-3 years old. Yes.. 3 years old, with a landing page with an email box and no actual product in the wild. Ok, they might have a few beta customers and you might be learning about the market, but I thought that startups move fast. Nothing moves faster than an indie hacker after all.

Or maybe running around pitching to VCs to raise money does not leave you any time to actually build  a product,  lol.

Ok so back to what we were talking about, filtering out startups.Yes, the just mentioned bullshit Wordpress startups will be excluded.

I can also filter out many other startups as well.

But they are still too many...

Last but not least,  every entry on the list should have the CEO or someone to contact. If not, it’s useless. The service  is to get new customers, you need  a door to get in.

So that’s my job basically. A human filter above the vast information outside there.

I’m a bit better now, but still stressed.  Very stressed. I am basically running against the clock and building my parachute after jumping off  the plane.

Now my dilemma that’s fucking up my head is whether I should continue to do it manually or create some kind of automation. On one hand, I  feel like automating something this early is a big mistake. I have to go through the motions myself at least once or twice. On the other hand, I am afraid that maybe there is not enough time…

If you read my blog post from a few days ago, when I was thinking about launching  CyberLeads, I said the same thing, that I would either go slow and collect emails, get feedback, start building the product etc etc or just jump off the fucking plane, launch, and build my parachute while I’m falling.

I knew what I signed up for, so I should shut up and make it happen.

On the 1st of March you are going to deliver a fantastic product to your lovely customers.

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