Downhill Product Making: Entrepreneurship Shouldn’t Feel Hard

There is something magical about trains.

Trains are romantic—the perfect place for a writer to feel inspired. I took a train five minutes ago, and I felt an energy that put me immediately to write.

I am not going very far. It doesn’t matter a lot. An hour and a half is enough time to get anything done when you have full focus, no distractions, or nowhere to go. My destination is a small city in the middle of Poland, a place that probably none of you have heard about before.

Downhill Product Making an easy approach to start making.

Working hard and results are not correlated.

You can work hard and have zero results. Also, you can do something in five minutes and have an amazing outcome from it.

It’s easy to understand why. Imagine that you have to ask someone how to go somewhere in a foreign language. You have to put a big effort to speak, defeat your fears, and understand what the other person is saying.

If a native speaker does the same, this person's effort is close to zero.

But the outcome is the same.

If we translate this to starting a business is clear to realize that this could happen in many situations.

When you start, you need to find something natural to you that feels easy and can do for a long time.

There are three options.

Uphill Product Making: You need to push your idea and constantly keep pushing to avoid it going back.

Flat Product Making: You need to push your idea, and if you stop, the results stay, but it won’t grow.

Downhill Product Making: You give it a little push, and without doing much, it goes downhill.

Consider these 3 real examples.

Uphill Product Making

I was talking last week with Carlos Tenor (@carlostenor), founder of podstatus.com. He’s worked on this project for almost two years, every day from Monday to Sunday while having a full-time job. He had some happy moments and some spikes in traffic over these two years, but for most of the time, it’s like going up the hill.

He has to take care of his current clients. Find new ones. Keep adding new features. Take care of the servers.

One key thought. He likes it (most of the time). But still, it’s a big effort.

That’s hard. You have to be very stubborn to keep going. And the results from this massive effort can be really high, but also the chances to quit.

If he stops, the project goes down. So he needs to keep pushing every day.

Flat Product Making

This project is similar to the previous one, but with a big difference, the project stays in the same place if you stop pushing.

I started a coffee project, and I had to go and find people to join. It was a community. I stopped working on it, at least for now, but the results stayed. The people who joined are still there.

You still need to put in the work, but if you stop for a couple of months or only work on it a day a week, it won’t go back (at least not a lot).

Downhill Product Making

This is for me, writing about habits, entrepreneurship, and lifestyle. I love it. I enjoy it. I like sharing. I love the feedback and interaction with people. It feels like playing.

Plus, every article I published has an impact. Sometimes a big one, like one article from last week that made me almost $700, and others a small impact, but it feels natural.

I don’t have to make any effort. People ask me for more. It’s just something that comes naturally to me. For others, writing this content would be a nightmare. For me, it’s a pleasure.

Entrepreneurship shouldn’t feel hard.

Suppose you are starting today and don’t have much time because you have a full-time job or don’t want to spend forever working on something. Aim for the last one.

How to recognize it?

I think you need to find the intersection between fun, work, and verify the results you are getting. But honestly, you know it when you see it. If you have doubts, keep trying new things.

By the way, the city is called Kalisz.

Thanks for reading!