Indie Hacker Diaries #30: The Last Ten Percent

As I finish up work on v1 of Mod, the “last 10 percent” problem has been on my mind.

Anyone who’s built anything knows that beyond starting, the second hardest part of any project is finishing the last 10%.

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “why.” Even though I’m excited to get what I’m building out the door, there’s still a subconscious apprehension.

Something holding me back from just shipping the damn thing.

I alluded to this problem a few letters back, discussing the importance of trusting yourself and, practically, your own tacit knowledge of whether or not something is right.

That can come up during the last 10% of a project (and to be clear, that last 10% is more or less arbitrary), however, typically the alarms are going off well in advance.

What I’m talking about here is when you know you’re on the right path, you’re committed, and the only thing standing between you and shipping is purely a matter of will.

Thinking about it this week, I think I landed on a “why.”

The reason the last 10% feels more difficult isn’t because the work is necessarily harder to complete, but rather, because of what shipping means.

Once your thing is out the door, that’s it. In a lot of ways, it no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the world. And that’s fucking scary.

In the wild, your idea is either to going to live or die. It’s going to be judged, often harshly, for its merits and failures. I think, deep down, this is that difficult-to-label feeling of friction you get as you near the finish line.

It may not be conscious, but somewhere in your mind you’re asking “what happens if this fails?” And even scarier, “what happens if this succeeds?”

If your idea fails, you have to take at least a minor blow to your ego. You have to admit you were wrong (or at least, not all the way right), and decide whether you’re going to pivot or say “screw it” and throw away all of your work.

If your idea succeeds, that means your life will change; no matter how big or small the project. You will be responsible for maintaining it. You will be responsible for marketing it. You will be responsible for growing your user base. You will have to stand naked amongst your peers, with all of their red dots peppering your skin.

Stressful, eh?

But, there’s a way around it.

I’ve shared his work countless times over the years, but the one entrepreneur I go back to often is Ari Weinzweig. If you haven’t heard me mention that name before, Ari is the CEO of Zingerman’s: a self-proclaimed community of businesses based in Ann Arbor, Michigan that’s been in business for over 40 years. What started as a small, corner delicatessen has blossomed into an eight-figure business.

Quick side note: I had the privilege of meeting with and interviewing Ari a few years back when I was running Clever Beagle. The interview is still up on YouTube if you want to give it a listen.

One of my favorite lines by Ari is the blunt “success just means you get better problems.”

I had that quote pinging through my head all week as I thought about this. It reminded me of one of the greatest tools I’ve ever learned from reading and listening to Ari, which is the process he and the team at Zingerman’s have used for decades to determine their strategy: visioning.

Visioning is the simple idea that—much like driving somewhere in a car—in order to get somewhere, you have to know where you’re going. Instead of just blindly starting down some path, Ari suggests that you should define a hyper-clear vision of where you’re going to go.

That vision is just a statement describing what reality will look like at some point in the future. For example, a line from Zingerman’s current 2032 vision:

“History comes alive every day in our food. While much of the food world follows trends, changing focus every five or six months, we are still committed to re-discovering and educating about traditional, full-flavored foods. We are the experts people call for advice about ingredients, recipes, products, and food prep. We’ve been known for our historical approach and it continues. We’ve uncovered foods we never thought existed. Old school sources—little known or understood outside their home regions—are now standards of ZCoB fare.”

Notice how that’s written as though it’s present tense. The idea here is that you want to “paint” your ideal future, describing the exact feeling and emotion of already being there.

The point of this is that it rhetorically speaking gives you a map of sorts that you can reverse engineer to figure out how to get there.

Taking liberty with the above statement, if I were leading Zingerman’s, I can pick out a few strategic points that I’d need to accomplish to fulfill that vision:

1. We should constantly be studying the history of food. We should have a quarterly book club, featuring different stories about different cultures and their traditions surrounding food to identify different foods we’ve never encountered.
2. The Zingerman’s leadership should have a mandatory retreat, twice per year, where we travel to a foreign country who’s food and culture we’re unfamiliar with. We should establish relationships with people in those regions who can connect us with suppliers and recipes that we can bring back to ZCoB.
3. We should have a quarterly meeting with the entire staff about different dishes they’d like to see added to the menu, asking what they’ve had recently that they’ve enjoyed or learned about.

I could keep going, but hopefully the idea is clear.

By painting a picture of the future, it’s far easier to figure out how to get there.

When it comes to the last 10% of a project, you can know whether or not your fears are valid based on whether or not what you’ve completed so far is in service of the vision you’ve outlined.

If your answer is generally “yes,” you can comfortably move forward, recognizing that while you can’t predict the future behavior of others, you at least know whether or not your own actions are aligned with your own vision.

That is worth it’s weight in gold.

When it came to Mod, I had a far simpler vision:

“A developer sits down at their computer, excited to build a new feature. They’re inspired by other apps they’re using, with clever UIs that are well-designed and polished. Frustrated, knowing they lack the design skills to achieve the same, they get nervous. They try to write some CSS, but it just doesn’t look or feel right. Over lunch, they look at Product Hunt and discover Mod. A CSS framework that gives them everything they’ll need to build their product and all of their marketing. It looks great, has a thoughtful user experience, and ticks all of the boxes of the UIs of the apps they’re used to using and being charmed by.”

Based on this vision, now, I can look at where I’m at and ask “how are we doing?”

As of today, I’m damn close to making this vision a reality. I’m finishing up the first set of Plus (that’s the paid version of Mod) components that I wanted to add and then I’m moving on to administrative stuff like payments.

Knowing exactly how close I am, the fear of what happens next is non-existent. That apprehension has subsided. Each day, I just sit down and build, remaining aware of the vision I’m aiming at. Like I alluded to a couple of letters back, the when doesn’t matter because the what is what others will experience.

If you’re actively building your own product (or thinking about building one), give this a shot. You don’t have to go to the level of detail that Zingerman’s does, but the more concrete you can get, the better.

Don’t leave your path up to chance. Define your vision, then work backwards to get there, trusting that the result you produce won’t be a mistake; it will be the fulfillment of your own prophecy.