Half-Built Bridges Lead To Nowhere

Dear Lee,

You have spent the last year chasing product market fit. Long days. Longer nights. Waking up stressed, going to bed disillusioned, running through strategy after strategy and whatever the latest guru is teaching this month.

Why is it that none of it WORKS?

You are making the mistake almost every founder makes before their first real win. You are busy being busy. But you are not being effective.

Daniel Priestley has a phrase for what's actually happening. Half-built bridges lead to nowhere.

That is the trap.

Look at what's lying around the business right now. A handful of unfinished masterpieces, every one of them dropped the moment something more urgent turned up.

1 lead magnet that is remarkable is worth more than 99 unfinished ones.

A crappy lead magnet that's actually finished is still just a crappy lead magnet. But an unfinished one isn't even that. It's nothing. A bridge stopped in mid-air over a river, going nowhere, helping no one, and it cost you the time and the materials regardless.

I understood this properly standing in front of Michelangelo's David in Florence.

People travel across the world to stand in front of that statue. Even if you've never set foot in a gallery in your life, you've seen a photo of it. It is, by any measure, remarkable.

A few rooms over in the same museum sit Michelangelo's unfinished Slaves. Same sculptor. Same skill. Figures still half-trapped in the marble, an arm free, a torso still rock. Nobody travels for those. They're only kept at all because David gives them context. Unfinished, by an unknown hand, they'd have been rubble a century ago.

You have your own unfinished Slaves scattered through this business.

There's real potential in every one of them. But potential locked in unfinished marble is worth exactly nothing until somebody picks up the chisel and finishes the job.

This is where F.O.C.U.S comes in. Follow One Course Until Success.

Until you've got a hundred A players and a war chest of cash, you don't get to run six half-finished projects at once and hope one of them breaks through. You get to pick one. One asset. One lead magnet. One offer. And you refine it, launch it, take the feedback, refine it again, until it's genuinely in the top one percent of what exists in your market.

Not good. Remarkable.

As a rule of thumb, it takes me at least 3 iterations of anything I launch before it really starts to see results. Launch -> Refine -> Refine -> Refine...until the market tells you it's ready by actually reacting to it.

So here's what I want you to do for the next two weeks. Stop starting anything new.

Go back through the wreckage of half-built things sitting in this business and find the one with the most promise left in it. Pick it up. Finish it properly this time. Give it everything, not the leftover hour at the end of a long day.

Everyone has a half-finished idea like this sitting somewhere.

What's yours, and what's actually stopping you finishing it?

Lee