Linear helps me prioritize features while maintaining a high shipping velocity. I’ve used Linear to track all my feature work for Ferryman.io and it’s been a massive help in keeping myself organized and productive. If you help prioritizing your own work, use the link below to get 6 months of Linear Business for free.
As a quick aside, I’m sorry for the break in the newsletter! I wanted to take a handful of weeks away to gather my thoughts and reset. To let myself think without needing to write about what I’m thinking. Taking a break feels good. My goal is to be back to weekly articles going forward.
-Kevin
I believe that if you want one thing in life and really focus on achieving it, you can almost always get it. If you believe this too, and are willing to work long enough and hard enough to eventually achieve it, the most important task then becomes choosing the right goal.
But how do you choose the correct goal? Today, we’re constantly fed an endless stream of things we’re supposed to want or events we’re supposed to care about. For me, I’ve found the single best way to narrow my focus and intentionally direct my efforts towards tasks I’ve deemed important is to first turn off the faucet that is this endless drip of information inevitably clouding my judgement. Taking in fewer opinions and fewer streams of information helps me more clearer disect my own.
Recently, I was lucky enough to spend time in nature, in the mountains of California. During this trip, I thought a lot about the following question: “What do I want more than anything else?”
After a lot of thinking, I concluded that my goal is to work incredibly hard on a project that I deeply care about. A project that gives me a deep sense of meaning while simultaneously supporting my family financially. Something that eventually is successful enough that makes all other financial obligations optional.
I really believe that Ferryman could be this project. Over the last 300 days I’ve been able to consistently work on Ferryman with genuine joy and excitement. While the graph isn’t anything exponential I believe it has real potential to be a large product given enough time. If anything, looking back on my Stripe MRR graph is a helpful reminder of the amazing things that can happen if I’m willing to show up and work at something consistently. Looking back at different points in this graph is a good reminder to me of what could be possible if I commit to work on Ferryman for another 300 days, 600 days, 900 days, etc.
The product is genuinely helping myself and other creators manage crossposting across tons of different social platforms as well as grow their influence and following. Creators, including myself, are gardnering millions of impressions across additional platforms by doing no additional work. An added bonus for me, is I like posting to all my platforms directly from the create page so I avoid opening social apps and therefore am not tempted to scroll.
Someone I look up to and think about alot is Eric Barone, the creator of Stardew Valley. To be clear, I’m not comparing myself to Eric, but rather I aspire to be like him. Eric began working on Stardew because he couldn’t land a Software Engineering job after graduating from the University of Washington, Tacoma. He figured creating a project, like a video game, would help him land interviews and eventaully a job. Fortunately for him, he never did land a job. After enough rejections and time passing, Eric decided to simply commit to building Stardew fulltime. Fast forwarding, years later, Eric released the game, and to date has made many millions of dollars as a result.
What I aspire to the most is to be as obssessed and interesting in building something as Eric was with building Stardew Valley. And if I focus on achieving just that one thing, I think I might just be able to find it and from there I believe everything else will fall into place.
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