It Will Take Longer Than Expected

The hardest part of building Creator Kiwi (my creator economy startup) has been staying focused one one component of the app at the time without feeling like it’s taking too long.

Right now you see a lot of talk on social media about using AI to ship fast.

I’ve been using tools like Cursor, Warp, and Lovable to prototype and build interfaces faster, but designing a growing system takes extra planning that AI is less helpful for.

For small, well-understood problems, AI excels.

It’s taking a massive vision for a product and breaking it down into smaller chunks that’s difficult and harder to automate with AI.

The struggle I’ve had is discerning between whether I’m working too slow or this is just how long it takes to build something great.

I think it’s a little of both.

We underestimate how much effort is required to achieve our goals, partially because we can’t see the work and pain others who have it now went through.

To us, it looks like they just got it.

I believe that to have real success, you have to extend your timelines longer than feels comfortable.

Something Alex Hormozi said that I really resonated with was having long-term patience but short-term impatience.

This means knowing that what you’re working on will take years to bear results, and you have to be slow to change things if they’re “not working”.

At the same time, you need to make fast decisions in the day-to-day work.

For me right now that means quickly deciding whether a certain feature or interaction needs to exist.

After a lot of thought, I went from the idea of Creator Kiwi being a broad social media management/marketing tool to a tool for YouTube creators to better understand and monetize their audience.

If you’re working on a project now or trying to come up with ideas, the best advice I can give you is to be much clearer on who you’re trying to help and what outcome they will get from your product.

With this vision of ‘help YouTube creators earn more money’, it makes deciding what features are worth building a lot easier.

Anything that doesn’t help to solve that single problem is irrelevant.

Thinking like this has made me more efficient and saved time working on things that would not have mattered.

Have a great week.

Cole

P.S. Reply to this email and tell me what you’re building right now and the struggles you’re facing. I read every reply.