Get it out there

The hardest part about feedback isn't hearing it, it's putting your work out there in the first place. Once you realize that, everything changes. You build and release faster. You stop worrying about people criticizing your work and start learning from it instead. And you realize that feedback doesn't actually hurt that bad, unless you take it personally, which is something I struggle with but I'm starting to get over. As some of my mentors can attest, I'm a passionate person with deeply held beliefs but my job as a founder is to take advice from everyone and determine on my own what to use and what not to. Over the past year, I’ve watched multiple people get excited about their ideas, only to drop off when they hit roadblocks. Guess what: everyone hits roadblocks. Your job is to steer the ship around them. Sometimes you don’t choose the right road or the right path. It’s rarely smooth sailing. But if you’re willing to stop, pull out the map, and choose a slightly different route, you can always find your way back to the highway. That’s the process. You have to accept that maybe the problem you thought you were solving isn't as acute as you believed. You have to be honest when something isn't working and be willing to reposition, to come at it from a different angle. At the end of the day, it's all about creating value for someone else. Are you actually helping? Are you giving real value to your users? If you can't ask yourself that question honestly, you'll never succeed. Along the way, I've been forced to face my own limitations too, not so much what I'm capable of, but how much I can do with my time. I've spent so many hours talking to people that my head hurts. I've spent just as many hours staring at a screen, telling AI what to code, to the point that my Cursor bill is stacking up. A lot of the time, it feels like I'm banging my head against a wall. Actually, most of the time it feels that way. Constant follow-ups. Constant mistakes. Constantly worrying that I'm burdening someone. But I keep coming back to a philosophy I first heard from Mark Cuban: the best salesman is the one who truly believes in the value they’re selling. That’s what keeps me moving forward. The athletes I'm working with can see it. At the very least, they know I'm passionate and genuinely trying to help them. And in a way, I'm trying to become one of them. I spend most of my days either working or running. I know at least a small piece of what their life is like: the discipline, the grind, the training, and that helps me empathize with the work it takes to dedicate yourself to a professional sport. And truthfully, if I hadn't failed twice already, I wouldn't be here. The first two times I launched, our product sucked. But those failures showed me the one part that actually had promise: the part people cared about. That's what led me to this third iteration. Now, things feel different. We've got 26 of the top brands in the industry already partnered with us. We've got over 30 athletes and professionals in the space who are launching with us in October and some have made hundreds already. I'm making mistakes daily (plenty of them rookie mistakes), but I'm learning. And that's really the point. That’s why this essay is called Get It Out There. Because that’s what this is all about. Learning. Iterating. Finding out what actually works. You don’t learn by keeping things in your head. You learn by putting it out there.