What If Your Project Isn’t Good Enough Yet?

Have you ever felt afraid to launch a project because it wasn’t good enough yet?

I understand that feeling well. As a recovering perfectionist, I’m always afraid to push “start” on the latest digital marketing machine I’ve built until I’ve had a chance to make it better.

The problem is, “better” rarely comes.

This makes me wonder, “What if I publish something that sucks? What if I try a promotion that fails? Won’t the internet remember that and think I suck, too?”

Today, I read a post on Groove about how they grew their business to 100 paying customers in 24 hours.

The entire thing is worth a read if you’ve got the time. But if not, here’s the best part:

The first post we had that did well would eventually become the post that inspired this Journey to $500K blog that you’re reading now. It was about how we got 1,000+ private beta signups.

Honestly, it’s a bit embarrassing to read. The post would never see the light of day on the blog today, but we took an important first step in realizing the power of content marketing when the post got picked up on Hacker News, and even reached the top spot for nearly half of a day.

See that? Though their current standards would never approve that post, it still got them the traction they needed to grow.

It’s okay to share what you have now, even if you know it’ll be better someday.

You don’t have to be perfect. As Seth Godin says, “Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly.”

Trying something and failing is better than being too paralyzed to try.

The internet won’t care that one of your blog posts on your archive isn’t great. They’ll only care what you’re offering now. Everything else is basically ignored as long as it isn’t outrageously offensive.